The internet of medical things has been developed to facilitate remote monitoring of the patients as well as the elderly. Unfortunately, the communication between the remote patients and the medical doctors is the open wireless channels. Therefore, the data transmitted can be eavesdropped, intercepted, replayed or modified. This poses serious challenges to patient privacy as well as endangering patient life. To curb this, numerous schemes have been put forward by various researchers over the recent past. In this paper, we provide an extensive review of these schemes in an effort to identify any gaps. Consequently, we show that the current security and privacy preservation schemes have many challenges that render the communication process insecure or inefficient. As such, we offer some suggestions for the requirements of an ideal security technique that will not only be efficient but also provably secure.

The advancement in information communication technologies has seen the rise in the deployment of various information exchange devices in the healthcare sector. Among these technologies is the Tele-care Medical Information Systems (TMIS) in which remote users can establish a connection with the hospital medical server and share the necessary information between them. This can potentially offer doctors and patients more reasonable treatment plan, as well as helping address the huge medical expenses and excessive medical treatment duration. There is therefore need to store patient data in the end devices, as well as transmit this data over public channels to facilitate decision making. This paper sought to review the security schemes that have been developed over the recent past to protect the patient data stored or transmitted in TMIS.

Wireless sensor networks process and exchange mission-critical data relating to patients’ health status. Obviously, any leakages of the sensed data can have serious consequences which can endanger the lives of patients. As such, there is need for strong security and privacy protection of the data in storage as well as the data in transit. Over the recent past, researchers have developed numerous security protocols based on digital signatures, advanced encryption standard, digital certificates and elliptic curve cryptography among other approaches. However, previous studies have shown the existence of many security and privacy gaps that can be exploited by attackers to cause some harm in these networks. In addition, some techniques such as digital certificates have high storage and computation complexities occasioned by certificate and public key management issues. In this paper, a certificateless algorithm is developed for authenticating the body sensors and remote medical server units. Security analysis has shown that it offers data privacy, secure session key agreement, untraceability and anonymity. It can also withstand typical wireless sensor networks attacks such as impersonation, packet replay and man-in-the-middle. On the other hand, it is demonstrated to have the least execution time and bandwidth requirements.