SLIE: A Secure and Lightweight Cryptosystem for Data Sharing in IoT Healthcare Services
Ha Xuan Son, Nguyen Quoc Anh, Phat T. Tran-Truong, Le Thanh Tuan, Pham Thanh Nghiem
TL;DR
The paper tackles secure data sharing in IoMT by addressing device heterogeneity, regulatory compliance, and end-to-end security needs. It introduces SLIE, a lightweight WKD-IBE-based cryptosystem with hierarchical access control and expiry-based revocation, tailored for healthcare workflows. The approach encodes clinical hierarchies into the key derivation process, enabling non-commutative delegation and automated policy enforcement while maintaining low computational and energy overhead. Empirical results on realistic IoMT workloads show substantial speedups over RSA, strong end-to-end security, and favorable energy and memory footprints, supporting practical deployment in resource-constrained environments and compliance with HIPAA/GDPR. The work also provides open-source code and outlines future directions towards post-quantum resilience and standards interoperability (e.g., FHIR).
Abstract
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has revolutionized healthcare by transforming medical operations into standardized, interoperable services. However, this service-oriented model introduces significant security vulnerabilities in device management and communication, which are especially critical given the sensitivity of medical data. To address these risks, this paper proposes SLIE (Secure and Lightweight Identity Encryption), a novel cryptosystem based on Wildcard Key Derivation Identity-Based Encryption (WKD-IBE). SLIE ensures scalable trust and secure omnidirectional communication through end-to-end encryption, hierarchical access control, and a lightweight key management system designed for resource-constrained devices. It incorporates constant-time operations, memory obfuscation, and expiry-based key revocation to counter side-channel, man-in-the-middle, and unauthorized access attacks, thereby ensuring compliance with standards like HIPAA and GDPR. Evaluations show that SLIE significantly outperforms RSA, with encryption and decryption times of 0.936ms and 0.217ms for 1KB of data, an 84.54% improvement in encryption speed, a 99.70% improvement in decryption speed, and an energy efficiency of 0.014 J/KB.