A blockchain technology with advanced lightweight symmetric cryptography schemes and smart security framework for healthcare wireless body area networks

The rapid evolution of intelligent healthcare systems has brought Healthcare Wireless Body Area Networks (HWBANs) to the forefront of personalized health monitoring. However, current systems face critical challenges, including high computational overhead, centralized trust management, and limited privacy-preserving analytics for real-time sensitive health data. This study proposes a Blockchain-enabled Advanced Lightweight Symmetric Cryptography (ALSC) framework for secure and privacy-preserving HWBANs. The proposed ALSC is a modified PRESENT-like cipher that integrates dynamic key rotation, reduced S-box complexity, and parallel substitution-permutation operations to achieve high-speed encryption in resource-constrained WBAN nodes. The framework combines Federated Learning (FL) for decentralized health analytics and Blockchain-based Proof of Authority (PoA) for tamper-proof trust management. The framework integrates lightweight symmetric encryption with blockchain-based authentication to secure healthcare WBAN data. Empirical results show a 48% reduction in encryption time and a 27% decrease in communication latency compared to existing methods, confirming improved privacy preservation, integrity assurance, scalability, and low computational overhead. The system was implemented in Python 3.10 and evaluated on Raspberry Pi 4 edge devices acting as HWBAN gateway nodes, with performance metrics measured directly on the hardware. Performance metrics-including latency, throughput, and encryption speed-were measured empirically using high-precision timing via time.perf_counter(). Compared with standard lightweight ciphers (AES-128, PRESENT-80, and SPECK-64), the proposed ALSC achieved 0.02 s latency, 100 MB/s throughput, and 5 ms/KB encryption speed, demonstrating 32% lower delay and 24% higher throughput under identical network and cryptographic conditions. These results validate the effectiveness of the ALSC-Blockchain-FL integration in ensuring confidentiality, low latency, and scalability for real-time healthcare monitoring.