A secure pervasive health care system using location dependent unicast key generation scheme

Remote health monitoring has tremendous potential to improve quality of health care services in modern and ubiquitous medical environments. It helps to cut the cost in modern healthcare by avoiding unnecessary hospital visits for frequent checkups. In this context, security and protection of sensitive medical data such as Electronic Health Records (EHR), data integrity and protection of patient's privacy to be monitored are important aspects in order to increase user's acceptance of these new technologies. Secure communication protects data from unauthorized users and usually requires pair-wise keys. In all existing schemes these keys are generated and distributed to nodes wishing to communicate. The key generation phase is usually well-secured but the key distribution is not, as a result, they are vulnerable to security threats. This paper presents an overview of security threats in pervasive healthcare and presents a secure communication scheme which unlike other schemes does not store a key chain in the memory from a universal key space and eliminate key broadcast. Simulation and results indicate that our scheme outperforms the existing schemes by decreasing transmission and storage cost.