The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) supports health monitoring and data access and exchange in real time, but devices constrained in terms of energy, memory, and processing resources make traditional cryptographic protocols not applicable. This work presents a lightweight authentication framework that compares three symmetric encryption algorithms, TinyAES, SPECK, and PRESENT, designed for resource-limited IoMT systems. The method consists of four standalone phases: user registration, login authentication, session key exchange, and secure data transfer. The proposed approach was evaluated on the ESP32 and Raspberry Pi platforms, demonstrating up to 56% execution gain, 58% energy reduction, and 42% memory savings over ECC-based schemes. TinyAES achieves the best trade-off among all compared algorithms and is recommended for secure and sustainable medical IoT applications.
Naser et al. (Sat,) studied this question.