Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people's lives in all aspects. This pandemic has raised the usage of ubiquitous networks such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) for information exchange in various domains. MANET is a group of versatile nodes that communicates with each other without relying on a fixed physical framework. One of the prominent features of MANET is its versatile topology. Because of this striking feature, MANETs are employed in various domains like defense and combat operations, disaster management, healthcare, and environmental monitoring. In this paper, we enlighten the significance of MANET in the smart healthcare system. The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak demanded the reshaping of the healthcare systems to combat the pandemic and similar cataclysms. Existing healthcare systems are proved inefficient in dealing with pandemic situations, because they are not fully automated and also vulnerable to various security attacks. Therefore, it is vital to empower the healthcare sectors by integrating ubiquitous networks and other emerging technologies. In this paper, we proposed a MANET-based secure healthcare system to exchange medical data among portable nodes. Ensuring secure communication in the MANET-based healthcare system is one of the challenging issues. Healthcare system demands the sharing of confidential medical data among mobile nodes. So it is essential to provide secure information exchange in healthcare system by using strong cryptographic schemes. In this paper, we proposed a hybrid cryptographic algorithm for secure medical information exchange among mobile healthcare nodes. The proposed cryptographic scheme uses logistic map for key generation. Logistic map exhibits high security with less computational power. Our simulation results show that the proposed hybrid cryptographic scheme exhibits better security against various attacks in MANET-based healthcare systems.