EEPPDA—Edge‐enabled efficient privacy‐preserving data aggregation in smart healthcare Internet of Things network

The Internet of Things‐based smart healthcare provides numerous facilities to patients and medical professionals. Medical professionals can monitor the patient's real‐time medical data and diagnose diseases through the medical health history stored in the cloud database. Any kind of attack on the cloud database will result in misdiagnosis of the patients by medical professionals. Therefore, it becomes a primary concern to secure private data. On the other hand, the conventional data aggregation method for smart healthcare acquires immense communication and computational cost. Edge‐enabled smart healthcare can overcome these limitations. The paper proposes an edge‐enabled efficient privacy‐preserving data aggregation (EEPPDA) scheme to secure health data. In the EEPPDA scheme, captured medical data have been encrypted by the Paillier homomorphic cryptosystem. Homomorphic encryption is engaged in the assurance of secure communication. For data transmission from patients to the cloud server (CS), data aggregation is performed on the edge server (ES). Then aggregated ciphertext data are transmitted to the CS. The CS validates the data integrity and analyzes and processes the authenticated aggregated data. The authorized medical professional executes the decryption, then the aggregated ciphertext data are decrypted in plaintext. EEPPDA utilizes the batch verification process to reduce communication costs. Our proposed scheme maintains the privacy of the patient's identity and medical data, resists any internal and external attacks, and verifies the health data integrity in the CS. The proposed scheme has significantly minimized computational complexity and communication overhead concerning the existing approach through extensive simulation.