Security Issues With Internet Of Things In Healthcare

Discussion

What has been done in your field of research? What principles of selection are you going to use?

How are you going to order your discussion? Pure Theoretical, Practical, or Conceptual? What section headings will you use?

The future generation will see the growing connection between ‘physical things’ and ‘internet of things’. By this statement one means that various machines, appliances and instruments will be brought into our spectrum which would have the ability of integrating healthcare with internet processes. This is believed to be helpful in improving the quality and efficiency of the service that would be high value for the aged patients with various chronic conditions. Not only them, but patients who need constant supervision will also be able to use service easily. Researchers are going on to develop the efficiency, lowering costs and provide better patient care (Bhatt, 2017). However with great causes, come great difficulties. This entire system remains connected online and therefore may be subjected to different types of dishonesty and hacking discrepancies. Therefore the literature review would mainly focus on the various security issues it may face and how they can be overcome. It will hardly focus on the different areas where it can be applied in health care.

In order to point the security issues, one must first shed light on the concept of Internet of things and its uses on health care. The internet of things can be explained in terms of a concept that uses electronic devices. These devices are used to collect and monitor data and remains connected to private or public cloud. This helps in quick identifications of certain events automatically. This has been extensively used in healthcare services to reduce the work burden of healthcare providers and to make the entire process quick and error free. Data can be collected from fetal monitors, electrocardiograms, and temperature monitoring and blood glucose level. Health information can also be tracked which may require regular follow up. In thus cases, thus advancement has proved to be time and labor saving lessening direct patient physician contact.

Although most of the data storing devices had developed secured methods for communicative interaction on the cloud, they are still very much vulnerable to hackers who may steal information and lead to various types of nuances for both the organizations and also pose a threat to the life of patients. Hence, a proper security system for Internet of things in healthcare has been extremely necessary. Researchers have suggested that the more number of endpoints remain connected with the enterprise related IT backend systems through the public IP networks of various hospitals and different organizations, the chances of security breaches increase (DaXa, He & Li, 2014). Different security issues remain associated with each and every aspect of the application of Internet of Things in healthcare and therefore security models needs to be prepared which would have their aims in the following mentioned fields. Security model should assess the secure booting of the healthcare devices in order to check the platform integrity and also boot loader authenticity (Whitmore, Agarwal & DaXa, 2015).

Devices Vulnerability and Security Models

Lake et al. (2014) has stated that the modern security system should also analyze the proper  and secure storage of secret keys. The model need to be devised in such a way so that the storage cannot be physically tampered. The system should also have monitored over the access control which needs to be strictly protected. The storage of the data should be secured and this is one of the most important criteria of the proper security model because data when obtained by dishonest people may lead to threats not only to hospital reputation but also be life threatening to the patients. The security models should be built in such a way that the device identification must be of unique type in the field of health context so that only the parties involved can only access it (Gubbi et al. 2013)

Researchers like Chaudhari (2016) in his paper has also stated that proper security concerning the device and the collection is not enough to tackle the various types of crimes that may arise in different situations. The communication channel should also be monitored and researchers are still going on to find out the effective ways of protecting communication channel. Data confidentiality utilizes decryption and encryption of data between secure device and network during data exchanges. Data confidentiality also exists between the application server and the secure device. Special care is to be taken so that the security model may especially refer much significance to the data confidentiality issues.

Various literatures are also based on the security breaches that are often encountered in the ecosystem surrounding the healthcare devices that require specific care and strict surveillance while being utilized.  Vermesan and Friess (2015) have remarked that cryptographic Support associated with that of cryptographic protocols should be properly analyses such as AES and optionally PKI. Avery good example may be given in the above mentioned criteria to understand why proper encryption is very important to preserve the environment which was conducted by Lake et al. (2014). This example will also show why security models should be prepared in such a way so that it can also tackle uncertain environmental issues. The use of insulin pump E health device will help to shed light on the importance of correct security systems. A prominent insulin pump vendor helps to fix up a wireless connectivity system that would help to regulate the insulin pump and also the USB device that gas to be plugged into the computer system of the patient concerned. A proper well developed e-Health device would be considered to be much safe from any sort of risks in this environment (Pang et al., 2013). However many researchers have stated that communication protocols in such areas are not also safe and secured. He had even conducted experiment and showed that the insulin pump could be easily hacked if the hacker wants to control it. It is possible for the hacker to do so if he is close proximity with the device. The hacker would be able to fully tackle the pump according to his own wish. The most astonishing part is that the patient will not be able to even understand that his insulin pump is being tampered with. The hacker may even dispense complete reservoir of insulin pump without proper knowledge of the user. This may have dangerous results on the health of the user which may even claim his life.

Importance of Data Confidentiality

Researcher have also stated that most of the devices present in the market especially those present in the M2M/IoT devices categories (Machine to machine/Internet of things) that do not possess features by which encryption can be done on that particular device. Present researchers are trying their best to overcome these negative aspects that are exposing the devices to high level of security breaches. These devices mostly have sensors and memory that are actually small amount of on board memory. These statements were supported by Rahman, Daud and Mohamad in 2016. These current devices possess a microprocessor which is not at all capable of handling security protocols which belong to standard categories like AES 128 and others.  Many of them have come out with new devices with sensors and memory that are much more evolved. They are capable of 16 –bit processing.

Many researchers believe that the wireless network provides security to some extent. They have even commented that the present scheme of encryption over the GSM/GPRS networks is not at all safe and secure. However, in order to hack the system in these ciphers, the hackers need to have exceptional skill of technical sophistication to reach their goals.  Anggorojati (2015) has told that Security mechanism is high in the fields of 3G and 4G but that is of little use because their application in M2M/IoT devices is limited. Therefore to develop better security systems one must try to venture these criteria of involving 3G and 4G in the M2M/IoT devices so that healthcare sectors may tackle security issues successively.

Another very important area of research that should be mentioned in this context is the utilization of rogue based station software by the hackers.  Software belonging to such categories is OpenBTS and OpenBSC which are capable enough to launch MITM attack that can be called as a man in the middle attack. Lake et al. (2014) has also stated that the hackers only by using a patched cell phone and a rogue based station can enter into a vendor’s private network where cell phone builds bridge to the network of the vendor. Researchers have also come out with strategies to tackle the situation. A new security system can be introduced here, so that the hackers cannot corrupt the security systems.  The security model should contain an encryption mechanism, which is layered – 128 – bit AES followed by the A5 encryption on GPRS channel. This system can prevent the perpetrators to break through the AES encryption.

Limitations of Communication Channels and Encryption

Conclusion:

Internet of Things has ruled out millions of hearts in every nation since the concept of heterogeneous technologies has been introduced. Since then, its immense use in the healthcare sectors has attracted more service providers to implement them in their own system. Therefore, security and maintenance of the entire system has also been found to be extremely significant. Sicari et al. (2015) has stated that this is because the maintenance of authentication, data confidentiality, privacy, access control within the IOT network and trust issue among the users and providers have become extremely necessary. Therefore, enforcement of privacy policies and security have been extremely important. As a result different researchers have pointed out different security issues that have been intricately associated with them. They have also found out many alternatives to make the security system strong and effective. However, many backlogs are present which needs to be ventured in the coming years to ensure security models of IOT that would be free from discrepancies and security hacking techniques (River, 2015).

References:

Anggorojati, B. (2015). Access Control in IoT/M2M-Cloud Platform (Doctoral dissertation, Videnbasen for Aalborg UniversitetVBN, Aalborg UniversitetAalborg University, Det Teknisk-Naturvidenskabelige FakultetThe Faculty of Engineering and Science).

Bhatt, Y., & Bhatt, C. (2017). Internet of Things in HealthCare. In Internet of Things and Big Data Technologies for Next Generation Healthcare (pp. 13-33). Springer International Publishing.

Chaudhuri, A. (2016). Internet of things data protection and privacy in the era of the General Data Protection Regulation. Journal of Data Protection & Privacy, 1(1), 64-75

Da Xu, L., He, W., & Li, S. (2014). Internet of things in industries: A survey. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 10(4), 2233-2243.

Gubbi, J., Buyya, R., Marusic, S., & Palaniswami, M. (2013). Internet of Things (IoT): A vision, architectural elements, and future directions. Future Generation Computer Systems, 29(7), 1645-1660.

Lake, D., Milito, R., Morrow, M., & Vargheese, R. (2014). Internet of things: Architectural framework for ehealth security. Journal of ICT Standardization, River Publishing, 1.

Pang, Z., Chen, Q., Tian, J., Zheng, L., & Dubrova, E. (2013, January). Ecosystem analysis in the design of open platform-based in-home healthcare terminals towards the internet-of-things. In Advanced Communication Technology (ICACT), 2013 15th International Conference on(pp. 529-534). IEEE.

Rahman, A. F. A., Daud, M., & Mohamad, M. Z. (2016, March). Securing Sensor to Cloud Ecosystem using Internet of Things (IoT) Security Framework. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Internet of things and Cloud Computing (p. 79). ACM.

River, W. (2015). Security in the Internet of Things. Wind River Systems, Tech. Rep.

Sicari, S., Rizzardi, A., Grieco, L. A., & Coen-Porisini, A. (2015). Security, privacy and trust in Internet of Things: The road ahead. Computer Networks, 76, 146-164.

Whitmore, A., Agarwal, A., & Da Xu, L. (2015). The Internet of Things—A survey of topics and trends. Information Systems Frontiers, 17(2), 261-274.

Vermesan, O., & Friess, P. (Eds.). (2015). Building the hyperconnected society: Internet of things research and innovation value chains, ecosystems and markets (Vol. 43). River Publishers.