Secure and Lightweight Cipher for Resource-constrained IoT Healthcare Applications using Snake Key Generation

The integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare has transformed the monitoring of physiological parameters, significantly enhancing the capabilities of medical diagnostics and patient care. This study explores the use of advanced cryptographic techniques to secure IoT healthcare systems, particularly through block chain (BC) technology. Moreover, this study evaluates the effectiveness of two cryptographic key generators—bee swarm key generator and snake key generator—in enhancing data security within a BC-based framework for remote patient monitoring. Our study conducts a series of NIST randomness tests to compare the performance of these key generators in terms of randomness, resilience to cryptographic attacks and computational efficiency. Results show that the snake key generator outperforms the bee swarm key generator, demonstrating higher randomness in key generation and better secure coverage of the orientation space. This finding is crucial for securing important healthcare data, especially given the complexity of IoT devices, which transmit vital patient health information. Furthermore, this study examines the double-layer encryption architecture used to secure data in at rest and during transmission from a sensor’s gathering location to long-term storage. This approach is essential to preserve the privacy and integrity of patient data, which is critical for maintaining trust in IoT healthcare systems. This study aims to provide a comprehensive and comparative analysis to support the continued evolution of secure, efficient and scalable cryptographic solutions within IoT healthcare, demonstrating the importance of selecting the most effective key generation technique to address the unique security challenges of this new field.