Equality Test on Identity-Based Encryption With Cryptographic Reverse Firewalls for Telemedicine Systems

The emergence of the COVID-Omicron XBB variant has intensified the need for wireless body area networks (WBANs) in telemedicine, underscoring their critical role in remote patient monitoring and demanding robust security solutions to protect health data and patient privacy. To address this need, we introduce the equality test on identity-based encryption with cryptographic reverse firewalls (ET-IBE-CRFs). This protocol allows the medical server in a telemedicine system to execute the equality test on the encrypted data and retrieve the result without knowing any relevant information about the ciphertext. By incorporating cryptographic reverse firewalls (CRFs), the ET-IBE-CRF protocol effectively counters offline message recovery attacks (OMRAs) and algorithm substitution attacks (ASAs) without requiring secure communication channels. Our evaluation indicates that ET-IBE-CRF not only meets the strict requirements for confidentiality and privacy in telemedicine applications but also maintains high efficiency. This makes it well-suited for high-performance telemedicine systems.