Healthcare applications are considered as promising fields for wireless sensor networks, where patients can be monitored using wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs). Current WMSN healthcare research trends focus on patient reliable communication, patient mobility, and energy-efficient routing, as a few examples. However, deploying new technologies in healthcare applications without considering security makes patient privacy vulnerable. Moreover, the physiological data of an individual are highly sensitive. Therefore, security is a paramount requirement of healthcare applications, especially in the case of patient privacy, if the patient has an embarrassing disease. This paper discusses the security and privacy issues in healthcare application using WMSNs. We highlight some popular healthcare projects using wireless medical sensor networks, and discuss their security. Our aim is to instigate discussion on these critical issues since the success of healthcare application depends directly on patient security and privacy, for ethic as well as legal reasons. In addition, we discuss the issues with existing security mechanisms, and sketch out the important security requirements for such applications. In addition, the paper reviews existing schemes that have been recently proposed to provide security solutions in wireless healthcare scenarios. Finally, the paper ends up with a summary of open security research issues that need to be explored for future healthcare applications using WMSNs.

The proliferation of current wireless communications and information technologies have been altering humans lifestyle and social interactions-the next frontier is the smart home environments or spaces. A smart home consists of low capacity devices (e.g., sensors) and wireless networks, and therefore, all working together as a secure system that needs an adequate level of security. This paper introduces lightweight and secure session key establishment scheme for smart home environments. To establish trust among the network, every sensor and control unit uses a short authentication token and establishes a secure session key. The proposed scheme provides important security attributes including prevention of various popular attacks, such as denial-of-service and eavesdropping attacks. The preliminary evaluation and feasibility tests are demonstrated by the proof-of-concept implementation. In addition, the proposed scheme attains both computation efficiency and communication efficiency as compared with other schemes from the literature.

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Smart meters are considered as foundational part of the smart metering infrastructure (SMI) in smart energy networks. Smart meter is a digital device that makes use of twoway communication between consumer and utility to exchange, manage and control energy consumptions within a home. However, despite all the features, a smart meter raises several securityrelated concerns. For instance, how to exchange data between the legal entities (e.g., smart meter and utility server) while maintaining privacy of the consumer. To address these concerns, authentication and key agreement in SMI can provide important security properties that not only to maintain a trust between the legitimate entities but also to satisfy other security services. This work presents a lightweight authentication and key agreement (LAKA) that enables trust, anonymity, integrity and adequate security in the domain of smart energy network. The proposed scheme employs hybrid cryptography to facilitate mutual trust (authentication), dynamic session key, integrity, and anonymity. We justify the feasibility of the proposed scheme with a testbed using 802.15.4 based device (i.e., smart meter). Moreover, through the security and performance analysis, we show that the proposed scheme is more effective and energy efficient compared to the previous schemes.

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The smart home is an environment, where heterogeneous electronic devices and appliances are networked together to provide smart services in a ubiquitous manner to the individuals. As the homes become smarter, more complex, and technology dependent, the need for an adequate security mechanism with minimum individual's intervention is growing. The recent serious security attacks have shown how the Internetenabled smart homes can be turned into very dangerous spots for various ill intentions, and thus lead the privacy concerns for the individuals. For instance, an eavesdropper is able to derive the identity of a particular device/appliance via public channels that can be used to infer in the life pattern of an individual within the home area network. This paper proposes an anonymous secure framework (ASF) in connected smart home environments, using solely lightweight operations. The proposed framework in this paper provides efficient authentication and key agreement, and enables devices (identity and data) anonymity and unlinkability. One-time session key progression regularly renews the session key for the smart devices and dilutes the risk of using a compromised session key in the ASF. It is demonstrated that computation complexity of the proposed framework is low as compared with the existing schemes, while security has been significantly improved.

Wireless sensor Networks (WSNs) deployed in distributed Internet of Things (IoT) applications should be integrated into the Internet. According to the distributed architecture, sensor nodes measure data, process, exchange information, and perform collaboratively with other sensor nodes and end-users, which can be internal or external to the network. In order to maintain the trustworthy connectivity and the accessibility of distributed IoT, it is important to establish secure links for end-to-end communication with a strong pervasive authentication mechanism. However, due to the resource constraints and heterogeneous characteristics of the devices, traditional authentication and key management schemes are not effective for such applications. This paper proposes a pervasive lightweight authentication and keying mechanism for WSNs in distributed IoT applications, in which the sensor nodes can establish secured links with peer sensor nodes and end-users. The established authentication scheme PAuthKey is based on implicit certificates and it provides application level end-to-end security. A comprehensive description for the scenario based behavior of the protocol is presented. With the performance evaluation and the security analysis, it is justified that the proposed scheme is viable to deploy in the resource constrained WSNs.

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has enabled the doctors to remotely diagnose the patients, control the medical equipment, and monitor the quarantined patients through their digital devices. Security is a major concern in IoMT because the IoT nodes exchange sensitive information between virtual medical facilities over the vulnerable wireless medium. Hence, the virtual facilities must be protected from adversarial threats through secure sessions. This paper proposes a lightweight and physically secure mutual authentication and secret key establishment protocol that uses Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) to enable the network devices to verify the doctor's legitimacy (user) and sensor node before establishing a session key. PUF also protects the sensor nodes deployed in an unattended and hostile environment from tampering, cloning, and side-channel attacks. The proposed protocol exhibits all the necessary security properties required to protect the IoMT networks, like authentication, confidentiality, integrity, and anonymity. The formal AVISPA and informal security analysis demonstrate its robustness against attacks like impersonation, replay, a man in the middle, etc. The proposed protocol also consumes fewer resources to operate and is safe from physical attacks, making it more suitable for IoT-enabled medical network applications.