Practical integrity preservation for data streaming in cloud-assisted healthcare sensor systems

In this paper, we address the problem of integrity protection for data streaming in cloud-assisted healthcare sensor systems. First, we propose a novel data structure, called the arithmetic Merkle tree (AMT), as a candidate method for ensuring the flexibility of the tree structure. However, AMT is flawed by one-wayness and therefore cannot be applied directly. We consider integrating homomorphic encryption with the AMT, and propose two solutions, called the PAMT (partially homomorphic encryption-based AMT) and the FAMT (fully homomorphic encryption-based AMT). Our proposed PAMT outperforms the existing solution because of the implementation of widely used software that optimizes partially homomorphic encryption. However, although the design of our proposed FAMT includes fully homomorphic encryption, in the case of data archival applications, transferal of the computation burden to the cloud server renders it very lightweight. The theoretical analysis and simulation results also confirm the efficiency of our PAMT and FAMT solutions.