Towards Smart Healthcare: Patient Data Privacy and Security in Sensor-Cloud Infrastructure

Nowadays, wireless body area networks (WBANs) systems have adopted cloud computing (CC) technology to overcome limitations such as power, storage, scalability, management, and computing. This amalgamation of WBANs systems and CC technology, as sensor-cloud infrastructure (S-CI), is aiding the healthcare domain through real-time monitoring of patients and the early diagnosis of diseases. Hence, the distributed environment of S-CI presents new threats to patient data privacy and security. In this paper, we review the techniques for patient data privacy and security in S-CI. Existing techniques are classified as multibiometric key generation, pairwise key establishment, hash function, attribute-based encryption, chaotic maps, hybrid encryption, Number Theory Research Unit, Tri-Mode Algorithm, Dynamic Probability Packet Marking, and Priority-Based Data Forwarding techniques, according to their application areas. Their pros and cons are presented in chronological order. We also provide our six-step generic framework for patient physiological parameters (PPPs) privacy and security in S-CI: (1) selecting the preliminaries; (2) selecting the system entities; (3) selecting the technique; (4) accessing PPPs; (5) analysing the security; and (6) estimating performance. Meanwhile, we identify and discuss PPPs utilized as datasets and provide the performance evolution of this research area. Finally, we conclude with the open challenges and future directions for this flourishing research area.