This article presents a novel hardware-assisted distributed ledger-based solution for simultaneous device and data security in smart healthcare. This article presents a novel architecture that integrates PUF, blockchain, and Tangle for Security-by-Design (SbD) of healthcare cyber–physical systems (H-CPSs). Healthcare systems around the world have undergone massive technological transformation and have seen growing adoption with the advancement of Internet-of-Medical Things (IoMT). The technological transformation of healthcare systems to telemedicine, e-health, connected health, and remote health is being made possible with the sophisticated integration of IoMT with machine learning, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and other technologies. As healthcare systems are becoming more accessible and advanced, security and privacy have become pivotal for the smooth integration and functioning of various systems in H-CPSs. In this work, we present a novel approach that integrates PUF with IOTA Tangle and blockchain and works by storing the PUF keys of a patient’s Body Area Network (BAN) inside blockchain to access, store, and share globally. Each patient has a network of smart wearables and a gateway to obtain the physiological sensor data securely. To facilitate communication among various stakeholders in healthcare systems, IOTA Tangle’s Masked Authentication Messaging (MAM) communication protocol has been used, which securely enables patients to communicate, share, and store data on Tangle. The MAM channel works in the restricted mode in the proposed architecture, which can be accessed using the patient’s gateway PUF key. Furthermore, the successful verification of PUF enables patients to securely send and share physiological sensor data from various wearable and implantable medical devices embedded with PUF. Finally, healthcare system entities like physicians, hospital admin networks, and remote monitoring systems can securely establish communication with patients using MAM and retrieve the patient’s BAN PUF keys from the blockchain securely. Our experimental analysis shows that the proposed approach successfully integrates three security primitives, PUF, blockchain, and Tangle, providing decentralized access control and security in H-CPS with minimal energy requirements, data storage, and response time.

This work presents a sustainable cybersecurity solution using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF), Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and Tangle Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for sustainable device and data security. Security-by-Design (SbD) or Hardware- Assisted Security (HAS) solutions have gained much prominence due to the requirement of tamper-proof storage for hardwareassisted cryptography solutions. Designing complex security mechanisms can impact their efficiency as IoT applications are more decentralized. In the proposed architecture, we presented a novel TPM-enabled PUF-based security mechanism with effective integration of PUF with TPM. The proposed mechanism is based on the process of sealing the PUF key in the TPM, which cannot be accessed outside the TPM and can only be unsealed by the TPM itself. A specified NV-index is assigned to each IoT node for sealing the PUF key to TPM using the Media Access Control (MAC) address. Access to the TPM's Non-Volatile Random Access Memory (NVRAM) is defined by the TPM's Enhanced Authorization policies as specified by the Trust Computing Group (TCG). The proposed architecture uses Tangle for sustainable data security and storage in decentralized IoT systems through a Masked Authentication Messaging (MAM) scheme for efficient and secure access control to Tangle. We validated the proposed approach through experimental analysis and implementation, which substantiates the potential of the presented PUFchain 4.0 for decentralized IoT-driven security solutions.

With the availability of low-cost sensor nodes there have been many standards developed to integrate and network these nodes to form a reliable network allowing many different types of hardware vendors to coexist. Most of these solutions however have aimed at industry-specific interoperability but not the size of the sensor network and the large amount of data which is collected in course of its lifetime. In this paper we use well studied data compression algorithms which optimize on bringing down the data redundancy which is related to correlated sensor readings and using a probability model to efficiently compress data at the cluster heads. As in the case of sensor networks the data reliability goes down as the network resource depletes and these types of networks lacks any central synchronization making it even more a global problem to compare different reading at the central coordinator. The complexity of calibrating each sensor and using an adaptable measured threshold to correct the reading from sensors is a severe drain in terms of network resources and energy consumption. In this paper we separate the task of comparative global analysis to a central coordinator and use a reference PMax which is a normalized probability of individual source which reflects the current lifetime reliability of the sensors calculated at the cluster heads which then is compared with the current global reliability index based on all the PMax of cluster heads. As this implementation does not need any synchronization at the local nodes it uses compress once and stamp locally without any threshold such as application specific calibration values (0-42degF) and the summarization can be application Independent making It more a sensor network reliability Index and using It independent of the actual measured values.

We address two critical issues in wireless sensor networks: (1) an extension of common Quality of Service (QoS) parameters to study the effects of ultra-low duty cycling applications, and (2) propose a new WSN passive clustering routing protocol using sleep cycles based on available renewable energy resources : Fusion Ambient Renewable MACS (FARMS). The results from lifetime based QoS in a time synchronized deployment show that for a best effort QoS multi-hop deployment with varying percentage of cluster heads, the lifetime is network size and protocol invariant. However, low sensing ranges result in dense networks and thus it becomes necessary to achieve an efficient medium-access protocol subject to power constraints. We present cross-layer energy dissipation per node and show the performance of the network by varying duty-cycles. The study of sensor FARMS harvesting applications allows to measure the impact on idle, sleep and renewable energy cycles and their unique deployment (in terms of density) needs as all the sensor are not active at all times. We show that efficiency of sensor deployment QoS can be provided in terms of distributed load balancing (20% static clustering) at each node, power-aware sleep scheduling (2X increase in lifetime), data aggregation efficiency(B-MAC performs 3X times better than CSMA) in multi-hop passive clustering implementations.

With the availability of low-cost sensor nodes there have been many standards developed to integrate and network these nodes to form a reliable network allowing many different types of hardware vendors to coexist. Most of these solutions however have aimed at industry-specific interoperability but not the size of the sensor network and the large amount of data which is collected in course of its lifetime. In this paper we use well studied data compression algorithms which optimize on bringing down the data redundancy which is related to correlated sensor readings and using a probability model to efficiently compress data at the cluster heads. As in the case of sensor networks the data reliability goes down as the network resource depletes and these types of networks lacks any central synchronization making it even more a global problem to compare different reading at the central coordinator. The complexity of calibrating each sensor and using an adaptable measured threshold to correct the reading from sensors is a severe drain in terms of network resources and energy consumption. In this paper we separate the task of comparative global analysis to a central coordinator and use a reference PM ax which is a normalized probability of individual source which reflects the current lifetime reliability of the sensors calculated at the cluster heads which then is compared with the current global reliability index based on all the PMax of cluster heads. As this implementation does not need any synchronization at the local nodes it uses compress once and stamp locally without any threshold such as application specific calibration values (30±C ) and the summarization can be application independent making it more a sensor network reliability index and using it independent of the actual measured values.