Emergency Locksmith: A Restricted Dynamic Device Authentication Design Pattern for the Healthcare IoT

Abstract

Authentication is one of the emerging mechanisms required for a reliable IoT system. In health care environment, this became critical due to the nature of data carried and tasks of the system. There are various proposed schemes for authentication. Password based, cryptography based, hardware based, and behavioral are the extensive approaches with different characteristics. However, as in other IoT environments, the devices in healthcare are vary widely with their hardware limitations. The sensitive data they are responsible for is another case. Therefore, accomplishing the desired cooperation between diverse devices is limited in applications. In emergency, the healthcare IoT devices must be available and coordinate to share vital data to the emergency systems in need. Software design patterns are known to enable integration of software objects and modules in a reusable way. In this paper we described emergency authentication cases and proposed a design pattern for dynamic changing environment of the IoT. As on software paradigm, the pattern is convenient for heterogeneity of healthcare IoT system to adapt and implement its authentication task and priority of human health. The security of the data access is provided with applied restrictions. Achievements and shortcomings are also discussed. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.