Empowering integrity and confidentiality in smart healthcare systems through effective edge cryptographic strategies

Cybersecurity threats pose a significant risk to IoT-based smart healthcare technologies by compromising patient safety, disrupting services, and exposing sensitive health data to unauthorized access and misuse. This research aims to strengthen data integrity and confidentiality in smart healthcare systems by developing edge-level cryptographic strategies tailored for IoT-enabled edge environments, addressing the security and privacy challenges of resource-constrained devices. The proposed methodology Cryptographic Security Framework with SignaVault Authentication (CSFVA) integrates lightweight cryptographic techniques with edge computing to secure healthcare data efficiently and in real time. The novelty of this research lies in the unified implementation of a layered cryptographic pipeline, comprising Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for encryption, a Secure Hash Crypto Technique (SHCT) for data integrity, and a Signa-Vault (SV) authentication mechanism for user and device verification. This tri-layered approach ensures data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity while sup porting the low-latency requirements of edge computing environments. Performance evaluation shows the model's efficiency, achieving a processing time of 5.81 seconds, memory use of 45.78 MB, power consumption of 4.2 W, and throughput of 99.67%. These results indicate that the proposed solution effectively balances security and resource efficiency, making it suitable for resource-limited IoT healthcare and scalable smart healthcare systems.