Security for networked smart healthcare systems: A systematic review

Background and Objectives Smart healthcare systems use technologies such as wearable devices, Internet of Medical Things and mobile internet technologies to dynamically access health information, connect patients to health professionals and health institutions, and to actively manage and respond intelligently to the medical ecosystem's needs. However, smart healthcare systems are affected by many challenges in their implementation and maintenance. Key among these are ensuring the security and privacy of patient health information. To address this challenge, several mitigation measures have been proposed and some have been implemented. Techniques that have been used include data encryption and biometric access. In addition, blockchain is an emerging security technology that is expected to address the security issues due to its distributed and decentralized architecture which is similar to that of smart healthcare systems. This study reviewed articles that identified security requirements and risks, proposed potential solutions, and explained the effectiveness of these solutions in addressing security problems in smart healthcare systems. Methods This review adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis (PRISMA) guidelines and was framed using the Problem, Intervention, Comparator, and Outcome (PICO) approach to investigate and analyse the concepts of interest. However, the comparator is not applicable because this review focuses on the security measures available and in this case no comparable solutions were considered since the concept of smart healthcare systems is an emerging one and there are therefore, no existing security solutions that have been used before. The search strategy involved the identification of studies from several databases including the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAL), Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science, Medline, Excerpta Medical database (EMBASE), Ebscohost and the Cochrane Library for articles that focused on the security for smart healthcare systems. The selection process involved removing duplicate studies, and excluding studies after reading the titles, abstracts, and full texts. Studies whose records could not be retrieved using a predefined selection criterion for inclusion and exclusion were excluded. The remaining articles were then screened for eligibility. A data extraction form was used to capture details of the screened studies after reading the full text. Of the searched databases, only three yielded results when the search strategy was applied, i.e., Scopus, Web of science and Medline, giving a total of 1742 articles. 436 duplicate studies were removed. Of the remaining articles, 801 were excluded after reading the title, after which 342 after were excluded after reading the abstract, leaving 163, of which 4 studies could not be retrieved. 159 articles were therefore screened for eligibility after reading the full text. Of these, 14 studies were included for detailed review using the formulated research questions and the PICO framework. Each of the 14 included articles presented a description of a smart healthcare system and identified the security requirements, risks and solutions to mitigate the risks. Each article also summarized the effectiveness of the proposed security solution. Results The key security requirements reported were data confidentiality, integrity and availability of data within the system, with authorisation and authentication used to support these key security requirements. The identified security risks include loss of data confidentiality due to eavesdropping in wireless communication mediums, authentication vulnerabilities in user devices and storage servers, data fabrication and message modification attacks during transmission as well as while the data is at rest in databases and other storage devices. The proposed mitigation measures included the use of biometric accessing devices; data encryption for protecting the confidentiality and integrity of data; blockchain technology to address confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data; network slicing techniques to provide isolation of patient health data in 5G mobile systems; and multi-factor authentication when accessing IoT devices, servers, and other components of the smart healthcare systems. The effectiveness of the proposed solutions was demonstrated through their ability to provide a high level of data security in smart healthcare systems. For example, proposed encryption algorithms demonstrated better energy efficiency, and improved operational speed; reduced computational overhead, better scalability, efficiency in data processing, and better ease of deployment. Conclusion This systematic review has shown that the use of blockchain technology, biometrics (fingerprints), data encryption techniques, multifactor authentication and network slicing in the case of 5G smart healthcare systems has the potential to alleviate possible security risks in smart healthcare systems. The benefits of these solutions include a high level of security and privacy for Electronic Health Records (EHRs) systems; improved speed of data transaction without the need for a decentralized third party, enabled by the use of blockchain. However, the proposed solutions do not address data protection in cases where an intruder has already accessed the system. This may be potential avenues for further research and inquiry

METODY ZAPEWNIENIA BEZPIECZEŃSTWA DANYCH W STANDARDACH MOBILNYCH

The analysis of mobile communication standards is carried out, the functional structure and interfaces of interaction between the structural elements of the cellular network are considered. To understand the principle of communication according to the GSM standard, a block diagram of a mobile switching center (MSC), base station equipment (BSS), control and service center (MCC), mobile stations (MS) is presented. The main algorithms for ensuring the confidentiality and security of mobile subscribers' data, in different types of standards, as well as the vulnerabilities of information flows are considered. In particular, the following dangerous types of attacks have been identified, to which mobile network subscribers are sensitive: sniffing; leakage of personal data; leakage of geolocation data; spoofing; remote capture of SIM-card, execution of arbitrary code (RCE); denial of service (DoS). It is established that the necessary function of the mobile network is the identification of subscribers, which is performed by IMSI, which is recorded in the SIM card of the subscriber and the HLR of the operator. To protect against spoofing, the network authenticates the subscriber before starting its service. In the case of subscriber identification, the subscriber and the network operator are protected from the effects of fraudulent access. In addition, the user must be protected from eavesdropping. This is achieved by encrypting the data transmitted over the radio interface. Thus, user authentication in UMTS, as well as in the GSM network, is carried out using encryption with a common key using the "hack-response" protocol (the authenticating party sends a random number to the authenticated party, which encrypts it according to a certain algorithm using a common key and returns the result back).Przeprowadzana jest analiza standardów komunikacji mobilnej, rozważana jest struktura funkcjonalna i interfejsy interakcji między elementami strukturalnymi sieci komórkowej. Aby zrozumieć zasadę komunikacji w standardzie GSM, przedstawiono schemat blokowy centrali ruchomej (MSC), wyposażenia stacji bazowej (BSS), centrum sterowania i obsługi (MCC), stacji ruchomych (MS). Rozważane są główne algorytmy zapewniające poufność i bezpieczeństwo danych abonentów telefonii komórkowej, w różnych typach standardów, a także podatności na przepływ informacji. W szczególności zidentyfikowano następujące niebezpieczne rodzaje ataków, na które podatni są abonenci sieci komórkowych: sniffing; wyciek danych osobowych; wyciek danych geolokalizacyjnych; podszywanie się; zdalne przechwytywanie karty SIM, wykonanie dowolnego kodu (RCE); odmowa usługi (DoS). Ustalono, że niezbędną funkcją sieci komórkowej jest identyfikacja abonentów, która jest realizowana przez IMSI, która jest zapisywana na karcie SIM abonenta i HLR operatora. Aby zabezpieczyć się przed podszywaniem się, sieć uwierzytelnia subskrybenta przed uruchomieniem usługi. W przypadku identyfikacji abonenta, abonent i operator sieci są chronieni przed skutkami nieuprawnionego dostępu. Ponadto użytkownik musi być chroniony przed podsłuchem. Osiąga się to poprzez szyfrowanie danych przesyłanych przez interfejs radiowy. Tak więc uwierzytelnianie użytkownika w UMTS, jak również w sieci GSM, odbywa się z wykorzystaniem szyfrowania wspólnym kluczem z wykorzystaniem protokołu „hack-response” (strona uwierzytelniająca wysyła do strony uwierzytelnianej losową liczbę, która ją szyfruje zgodnie z pewien algorytm używający wspólnego klucza i zwraca wynik z powrotem)

An authentic-based privacy preservation protocol for smart e-healthcare systems in iot

© 2013 IEEE. Emerging technologies rapidly change the essential qualities of modern societies in terms of smart environments. To utilize the surrounding environment data, tiny sensing devices and smart gateways are highly involved. It has been used to collect and analyze the real-time data remotely in all Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Since the IIoT environment gathers and transmits the data over insecure public networks, a promising solution known as authentication and key agreement (AKA) is preferred to prevent illegal access. In the medical industry, the Internet of Medical Things (IoM) has become an expert application system. It is used to gather and analyze the physiological parameters of patients. To practically examine the medical sensor-nodes, which are imbedded in the patient\u27s body. It would in turn sense the patient medical information using smart portable devices. Since the patient information is so sensitive to reveal other than a medical professional, the security protection and privacy of medical data are becoming a challenging issue of the IoM. Thus, an anonymity-based user authentication protocol is preferred to resolve the privacy preservation issues in the IoM. In this paper, a Secure and Anonymous Biometric Based User Authentication Scheme (SAB-UAS) is proposed to ensure secure communication in healthcare applications. This paper also proves that an adversary cannot impersonate as a legitimate user to illegally access or revoke the smart handheld card. A formal analysis based on the random-oracle model and resource analysis is provided to show security and resource efficiencies in medical application systems. In addition, the proposed scheme takes a part of the performance analysis to show that it has high-security features to build smart healthcare application systems in the IoM. To this end, experimental analysis has been conducted for the analysis of network parameters using NS3 simulator. The collected results have shown superiority in terms of the packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, throughput rates, and routing overhead for the proposed SAB-UAS in comparison to other existing protocols

Data storage security and privacy in cloud computing: A comprehensive survey

Cloud Computing is a form of distributed computing wherein resources and application platforms are distributed over the Internet through on demand and pay on utilization basis. Data Storage is main feature that cloud data centres are provided to the companies/organizations to preserve huge data. But still few organizations are not ready to use cloud technology due to lack of security. This paper describes the different techniques along with few security challenges, advantages and also disadvantages. It also provides the analysis of data security issues and privacy protection affairs related to cloud computing by preventing data access from unauthorized users, managing sensitive data, providing accuracy and consistency of data store

Fuzzy-in-the-Loop-Driven Low-Cost and Secure Biometric User Access to Server

Fuzzy systems can aid in diminishing uncertainty and noise from biometric security applications by providing an intelligent layer to the existing physical systems to make them reliable. In the absence of such fuzzy systems, a little random perturbation in captured human biometrics could disrupt the whole security system, which may even decline the authentication requests of legitimate entities during the protocol execution. In the literature, few fuzzy logic-based biometric authentication schemes have been presented; however, they lack significant security features including perfect forward secrecy (PFS), untraceability, and resistance to known attacks. This article, therefore, proposes a novel two-factor biometric authentication protocol enabling efficient and secure combination of physically unclonable functions, a physical object analogous to human fingerprint, with user biometrics by employing fuzzy extractor-based procedures in the loop. This combination enables the participants in the protocol to achieve PFS. The security of the proposed scheme is tested using the well-known real-or-random model. The performance analysis signifies the fact that the proposed scheme not only offers PFS, untraceability, and anonymity to the participants, but is also resilient to known attacks using light-weight symmetric operations, which makes it an imperative advancement in the category of intelligent and reliable security solutions

Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Internet-Integrated Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will be integrated into the future Internet as one of the components of the Internet of Things, and will become globally addressable by any entity connected to the Internet. Despite the great potential of this integration, it also brings new threats, such as the exposure of sensor nodes to attacks originating from the Internet. In this context, lightweight authentication and key agreement protocols must be in place to enable end-to-end secure communication. Recently, Amin et al. proposed a three-factor mutual authentication protocol for WSNs. However, we identified several flaws in their protocol. We found that their protocol suffers from smart card loss attack where the user identity and password can be guessed using offline brute force techniques. Moreover, the protocol suffers from known session-specific temporary information attack, which leads to the disclosure of session keys in other sessions. Furthermore, the protocol is vulnerable to tracking attack and fails to fulfill user untraceability. To address these deficiencies, we present a lightweight and secure user authentication protocol based on the Rabin cryptosystem, which has the characteristic of computational asymmetry. We conduct a formal verification of our proposed protocol using ProVerif in order to demonstrate that our scheme fulfills the required security properties. We also present a comprehensive heuristic security analysis to show that our protocol is secure against all the possible attacks and provides the desired security features. The results we obtained show that our new protocol is a secure and lightweight solution for authentication and key agreement for Internet-integrated WSNs

Authentication Protocols for Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey

In this paper, a comprehensive survey of authentication protocols for Internet of Things (IoT) is presented. Specifically more than forty authentication protocols developed for or applied in the context of the IoT are selected and examined in detail. These protocols are categorized based on the target environment: (1) Machine to Machine Communications (M2M), (2) Internet of Vehicles (IoV), (3) Internet of Energy (IoE), and (4) Internet of Sensors (IoS). Threat models, countermeasures, and formal security verification techniques used in authentication protocols for the IoT are presented. In addition a taxonomy and comparison of authentication protocols that are developed for the IoT in terms of network model, specific security goals, main processes, computation complexity, and communication overhead are provided. Based on the current survey, open issues are identified and future research directions are proposed