Security and Privacy Protection in the e-Health System: Remote Monitoring of COVID-19 Patients as a Use Case

The Internet of Things (IoT) is characterized by heterogeneous technologies, which contribute to the provision of innovative services in various fields of application. Among these applications, we find the field of e-Health which provides a huge amount of data that served the health of patients remotely and in real time but also medical records, health monitoring and emergency response. e-Health systems require low latency and delay which is not guaranteed since data are transferred to the cloud and then back to the application, which can seriously affect performance. Also, COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need of remote monitoring of patients to reduce chances of infection among physicians and healthcare workers. To this end, Fog computing has emerged, where cloud computing is extended to the edge of the network to reduce latency and network congestion. This large amount of data is downloaded and stored on remote public cloud servers to which users cannot be fully trusted, especially when we are dealing with sensitive data like health data. In this scenario, meeting the confidentiality and patient privacy requirements becomes urgent for a large deployment of cloud systems. In this context, we offer a solution to secure the personal data of the e-Health system and protect the privacy of patients in an IoT–Fog–cloud environment while being based on cryptographic techniques especially CP-ABE and the blockchain paradigm. The results obtained are satisfactory, which allowed us to deduce that the solutions are protected against the most known attacks in IoT–Fog–cloud systems. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.