Game-Based Adaptive Remote Access VPN for IoT: Application to e-Health

Internet of Things (IoT) based pervasive healthcare systems have revolutionized the healthcare industry while enabling remote patient monitoring to improve patient care delivery and provide a highly reliable ubiquitous healthcare monitoring. In this context, Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a promising network layer technology that is used for a secure, reliable and remote access to patient health information. It is an overlay network that creates secure and dynamic tunnels between various devices across a public network such as the Internet. However, it is vulnerable to several attacks such as spoofing, snipping, and hacking as the data is transmitted through the Internet connection. In addition, due to the IoT device's energy constraints and the application requirements, the main purpose is to adaptively select the most appropriate encryption and authentication algorithms to secure the communication tunnel between these resource constrained devices and the remote user. Therefore, adaptive risk-aware secure tunnel negotiation is perceived as a major performance objective. In this paper, we propose a Stackelberg game for the security requirements negotiation between the communication peers in order to ensure a trade-off between security effectiveness and network performance while considering the dynamic context changes. Simulation results prove that the proposed approach can reduce the cost of security policy implementation in terms of performance degradation. For instance, the latency is improved by around 25% compared to static security policy.