Article
Public Auditing with Privacy Protection in
a Multi-User Model of Cloud-Assisted Body
Sensor Networks
Song Li
1
, Jie Cui
1,
*, Hong Zhong
1
and Lu Liu
2
1
School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China;
lisong@ahu.edu.cn (S.L.); zhongh@ahu.edu.cn (H.Z.)
2
Department of Computing and Mathematics, University of Derby, Derby DE22 1GB, UK;
L.Liu@derby.ac.uk
* Correspondence: cuijie@mail.ustc.edu.cn; Tel.: +86-137-2103-2191
Academic Editors: Lei Shu, Gerhard P. Hancke, Chunsheng Zhu and Mithun Mherjee
Received: 9 March 2017; Accepted: 27 April 2017; Published: 5 May 2017
Abstract:
Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs) are gaining importance in the era of the Internet
of Things (IoT). The modern medical system is a particular area where the WBSN techniques are
being increasingly adopted for various fundamental operations. Despite such increasing deployments
of WBSNs, issues such as the infancy in the size, capabilities and limited data processing capacities of
the sensor devices restrain their adoption in resource-demanding applications. Though providing
computing and storage supplements from cloud servers can potentially enrich the capabilities
of the WBSNs devices, data security is one of the prevailing issues that affects the reliability of
cloud-assisted services. Sensitive applications such as modern medical systems demand assurance
of the privacy of the users’ medical records stored in distant cloud servers. Since it is economically
impossible to set up private cloud servers for every client, auditing data security managed in the
remote servers has necessarily become an integral requirement of WBSNs’ applications relying on
public cloud servers. To this end, this paper proposes a novel certificateless public auditing scheme
with integrated privacy protection. The multi-user model in our scheme supports groups of users
to store and share data, thus exhibiting the potential for WBSNs’ deployments within community
environments. Furthermore, our scheme enriches user experiences by offering public verifiability,
forward security mechanisms and revocation of illegal group members. Experimental evaluations
demonstrate the security effectiveness of our proposed scheme under the Random Oracle Model
(ROM) by outperforming existing cloud-assisted WBSN models.
Keywords: cloud computing; wireless body sensor networks; privacy preserving; public auditing
1. Introduction
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become increasingly popular and find deployments
in several IoT applications such as military, transportation, healthcare, etc. Wireless Body Sensor
Networks (WBSNs) are an emerging form of WSNs [
1
], which exploits wearable computing devices
for processing applications. Remote healthcare monitoring of patient’s health [
2
] is one particular
example of WBSN deployments, by which doctors can monitor the patient’s health without the need
for physically visiting the patients. Given the affordability and easy access [
3
–
5
] to the sensor and other
embedded devices, WBSNs can now be deployed without any major investment costs. In a WBSN
deployment scenario, wearable sensor devices collect and send information to distant providers for
instant [
6
] processing of information. Thus WBSNs provide supplements for doctors to initiate instant
responses to fatal healthcare conditions, such as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Figure 1 shows
the system model of cloud-assisted WBSNs.
Sensors 2017, 17, 1032; doi:10.3390/s17051032 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors
