Cybersecurity and the Digital Health: An Investigation on the State of the Art and the Position of the Actors

Cybercrime is increasingly exposing the health domain to growing risk. The push towards a strong connection of citizens to health services, through digitalization, has undisputed advantages. Digital health allows remote care, the use of medical devices with a high mechatronic and IT content with strong automation, and a large interconnection of hospital networks with an increasingly effective exchange of data. However, all this requires a great cybersecurity commitment—a commitment that must start with scholars in research and then reach the stakeholders. New devices and technological solutions are increasingly breaking into healthcare, and are able to change the processes of interaction in the health domain. This requires cybersecurity to become a vital part of patient safety through changes in human behaviour, technology, and processes, as part of a complete solution. All professionals involved in cybersecurity in the health domain were invited to contribute with their experiences. This book contains contributions from various experts and different fields. Aspects of cybersecurity in healthcare relating to technological advance and emerging risks were addressed. The new boundaries of this field and the impact of COVID-19 on some sectors, such as mhealth, have also been addressed. We dedicate the book to all those with different roles involved in cybersecurity in the health domain

A Low-Energy Security Solution for IoT-Based Smart Farms

This work proposes a novel configuration of the Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS), suitable for low energy Internet of Things (IoT), applications. The motivation behind the redesign of TLS is energy consumption minimisation and sustainable farming, as exemplified by an application domain of aquaponic smart farms. The work therefore considers decentralisation of a formerly centralised security model, with a focus on reducing energy consumption for battery powered devices. The research presents a four-part investigation into the security solution, composed of a risk assessment, energy analysis of authentication and data exchange functions, and finally the design and verification of a novel consensus authorisation mechanism. The first investigation considered traditional risk-driven threat assessment, but to include energy reduction, working towards device longevity within a content-oriented framework. Since the aquaponics environments include limited but specific data exchanges, a content-oriented approach produced valuable insights into security and privacy requirements that would later be tested by implementing a variety of mechanisms available on the ESP32. The second and third investigations featured the energy analysis of authentication and data exchange functions respectively, where the results of the risk assessment were implemented to compare the re-configurations of TLS mechanisms and domain content. Results concluded that selective confidentiality and persistent secure sessions between paired devices enabled considerable improvements for energy consumptions, and were a good reflection of the possibilities suggested by the risk assessment. The fourth and final investigation proposed a granular authorisation design to increase the safety of access control that would otherwise be binary in TLS. The motivation was for damage mitigation from inside attacks or network faults. The approach involved an automated, hierarchy-based, decentralised network topology to reduce data duplication whilst still providing robustness beyond the vulnerability of central governance. Formal verification using model-checking indicated a safe design model, using four automated back-ends. The research concludes that lower energy IoT solutions for the smart farm application domain are possible

Privacy-aware Biometric Blockchain based e-Passport System for Automatic Border Control

In the middle of 1990s, World Wide Web technology initially steps into our life. Now, 30 years after that, widespread internet access and established computing technology bring embodied real life into Metaverse by digital twin. Internet is not only blurring the concept of physical distance, but also blurring the edge between the real and virtual world. Another breakthrough in computing is the blockchain, which shifts the root of trust attached to a system administrator to the computational power of the system. Furthermore, its favourable properties such as immutable time-stamped transaction history and atomic smart contracts trigger the development of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Combining above two, this thesis presents a privacy-aware biometric Blockchain based e-passport system for automatic border control(ABC), which aims for improving the efficiency of existing ABC system. Specifically, through constructing a border control Metaverse DAO, border control workload can be autonomously self-executed by atomic smart contracts as transaction and then immutably recorded on Blockchain. What is more, to digitize border crossing documentation, biometric Blockchain based e-passport system(BBCVID) is created to generate an immutable real-world identity digital twin in the border control Metaverse DAO through Blockchain and biometric identity authentication. That is to say, by digitizing border crossing documentation and automatizing both biometric identity authentication and border crossing documentation verification, our proposal is able to significantly improve existing border control efficiency. Through system simulation and performance evaluation by Hyperledger Caliper, the proposed system turns out to be able to improve existing border control efficiency by 3.5 times more on average, which is remarkable. What is more, the dynamic digital twin constructed by BBCVID enables computing techniques such as machine learning and big data analysis applicable to real-world entity, which has a huge potential to create more value by constructing smarter ABC systems

Advances in Information Security and Privacy

With the recent pandemic emergency, many people are spending their days in smart working and have increased their use of digital resources for both work and entertainment. The result is that the amount of digital information handled online is dramatically increased, and we can observe a significant increase in the number of attacks, breaches, and hacks. This Special Issue aims to establish the state of the art in protecting information by mitigating information risks. This objective is reached by presenting both surveys on specific topics and original approaches and solutions to specific problems. In total, 16 papers have been published in this Special Issue

Improving Access and Mental Health for Youth Through Virtual Models of Care

The overall objective of this research is to evaluate the use of a mobile health smartphone application (app) to improve the mental health of youth between the ages of 14–25 years, with symptoms of anxiety/depression. This project includes 115 youth who are accessing outpatient mental health services at one of three hospitals and two community agencies. The youth and care providers are using eHealth technology to enhance care. The technology uses mobile questionnaires to help promote self-assessment and track changes to support the plan of care. The technology also allows secure virtual treatment visits that youth can participate in through mobile devices. This longitudinal study uses participatory action research with mixed methods. The majority of participants identified themselves as Caucasian (66.9%). Expectedly, the demographics revealed that Anxiety Disorders and Mood Disorders were highly prevalent within the sample (71.9% and 67.5% respectively). Findings from the qualitative summary established that both staff and youth found the software and platform beneficial

The Impact of Digital Technologies on Public Health in Developed and Developing Countries

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval, ICOST 2020, held in Hammamet, Tunisia, in June 2020.* The 17 full papers and 23 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions. They cover topics such as: IoT and AI solutions for e-health; biomedical and health informatics; behavior and activity monitoring; behavior and activity monitoring; and wellbeing technology. *This conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic

The Impact of Digital Technologies on Public Health in Developed and Developing Countries

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval, ICOST 2020, held in Hammamet, Tunisia, in June 2020.* The 17 full papers and 23 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions. They cover topics such as: IoT and AI solutions for e-health; biomedical and health informatics; behavior and activity monitoring; behavior and activity monitoring; and wellbeing technology. *This conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic

A Framework for Facilitating Secure Design and Development of IoT Systems

The term Internet of Things (IoT) describes an ever-growing ecosystem of physical objects or things interconnected with each other and connected to the Internet. IoT devices consist of a wide range of highly heterogeneous inanimate and animate objects. Thus, a thing in the context of the IoT can even mean a person with blood pressure or heart rate monitor implant or a pet with a biochip transponder. IoT devices range from ordinary household appliances, such as smart light bulbs or smart coffee makers, to sophisticated tools for industrial automation. IoT is currently leading a revolutionary change in many industries and, as a result, a lot of industries and organizations are adopting the paradigm to gain a competitive edge. This allows them to boost operational efficiency and optimize system performance through real-time data management, which results in an optimized balance between energy usage and throughput. Another important application area is the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which is the application of the IoT in industrial settings. This is also referred to as the Industrial Internet or Industry 4.0, where Cyber- Physical Systems (CPS) are interconnected using various technologies to achieve wireless control as well as advanced manufacturing and factory automation. IoT applications are becoming increasingly prevalent across many application domains, including smart healthcare, smart cities, smart grids, smart farming, and smart supply chain management. Similarly, IoT is currently transforming the way people live and work, and hence the demand for smart consumer products among people is also increasing steadily. Thus, many big industry giants, as well as startup companies, are competing to dominate the market with their new IoT products and services, and hence unlocking the business value of IoT. Despite its increasing popularity, potential benefits, and proven capabilities, IoT is still in its infancy and fraught with challenges. The technology is faced with many challenges, including connectivity issues, compatibility/interoperability between devices and systems, lack of standardization, management of the huge amounts of data, and lack of tools for forensic investigations. However, the state of insecurity and privacy concerns in the IoT are arguably among the key factors restraining the universal adoption of the technology. Consequently, many recent research studies reveal that there are security and privacy issues associated with the design and implementation of several IoT devices and Smart Applications (smart apps). This can be attributed, partly, to the fact that as some IoT device makers and smart apps development companies (especially the start-ups) reap business value from the huge IoT market, they tend to neglect the importance of security. As a result, many IoT devices and smart apps are created with security vulnerabilities, which have resulted in many IoT related security breaches in recent years. This thesis is focused on addressing the security and privacy challenges that were briefly highlighted in the previous paragraph. Given that the Internet is not a secure environ ment even for the traditional computer systems makes IoT systems even less secure due to the inherent constraints associated with many IoT devices. These constraints, which are mainly imposed by cost since many IoT edge devices are expected to be inexpensive and disposable, include limited energy resources, limited computational and storage capabilities, as well as lossy networks due to the much lower hardware performance compared to conventional computers. While there are many security and privacy issues in the IoT today, arguably a root cause of such issues is that many start-up IoT device manufacturers and smart apps development companies do not adhere to the concept of security by design. Consequently, some of these companies produce IoT devices and smart apps with security vulnerabilities. In recent years, attackers have exploited different security vulnerabilities in IoT infrastructures which have caused several data breaches and other security and privacy incidents involving IoT devices and smart apps. These have attracted significant attention from the research community in both academia and industry, resulting in a surge of proposals put forward by many researchers. Although research approaches and findings may vary across different research studies, the consensus is that a fundamental prerequisite for addressing IoT security and privacy challenges is to build security and privacy protection into IoT devices and smart apps from the very beginning. To this end, this thesis investigates how to bake security and privacy into IoT systems from the onset, and as its main objective, this thesis particularly focuses on providing a solution that can foster the design and development of secure IoT devices and smart apps, namely the IoT Hardware Platform Security Advisor (IoT-HarPSecA) framework. The security framework is expected to provide support to designers and developers in IoT start-up companies during the design and implementation of IoT systems. IoT-HarPSecA framework is also expected to facilitate the implementation of security in existing IoT systems. To accomplish the previously mentioned objective as well as to affirm the aforementioned assertion, the following step-by-step problem-solving approach is followed. The first step is an exhaustive survey of different aspects of IoT security and privacy, including security requirements in IoT architecture, security threats in IoT architecture, IoT application domains and their associated cyber assets, the complexity of IoT vulnerabilities, and some possible IoT security and privacy countermeasures; and the survey wraps up with a brief overview of IoT hardware development platforms. The next steps are the identification of many challenges and issues associated with the IoT, which narrowed down to the abovementioned fundamental security/privacy issue; followed by a study of different aspects of security implementation in the IoT. The remaining steps are the framework design thinking process, framework design and implementation, and finally, framework performance evaluation. IoT-HarPSecA offers three functionality features, namely security requirement elicitation security best practice guidelines for secure development, and above all, a feature that recommends specific Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithms (LWCAs) for both software and hardware implementations. Accordingly, IoT-HarPSecA is composed of three main components, namely Security Requirements Elicitation (SRE) component, Security Best Practice Guidelines (SBPG) component, and Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithms Recommendation (LWCAR) component, each of them servicing one of the aforementioned features. The author has implemented a command-line tool in C++ to serve as an interface between users and the security framework. This thesis presents a detailed description, design, and implementation of the SRE, SBPG, and LWCAR components of the security framework. It also presents real-world practical scenarios that show how IoT-HarPSecA can be used to elicit security requirements, generate security best practices, and recommend appropriate LWCAs based on user inputs. Furthermore, the thesis presents performance evaluation of the SRE, SBPG, and LWCAR components framework tools, which shows that IoT-HarPSecA can serve as a roadmap for secure IoT development.O termo Internet das coisas (IoT) é utilizado para descrever um ecossistema, em expansão, de objetos físicos ou elementos interconetados entre si e à Internet. Os dispositivos IoT consistem numa gama vasta e heterogénea de objetos animados ou inanimados e, neste contexto, podem pertencer à IoT um indivíduo com um implante que monitoriza a frequência cardíaca ou até mesmo um animal de estimação que tenha um biochip. Estes dispositivos variam entre eletrodomésticos, tais como máquinas de café ou lâmpadas inteligentes, a ferramentas sofisticadas de uso na automatização industrial. A IoT está a revolucionar e a provocar mudanças em várias indústrias e muitas adotam esta tecnologia para incrementar as suas vantagens competitivas. Este paradigma melhora a eficiência operacional e otimiza o desempenho de sistemas através da gestão de dados em tempo real, resultando num balanço otimizado entre o uso energético e a taxa de transferência. Outra área de aplicação é a IoT Industrial (IIoT) ou internet industrial ou Indústria 4.0, ou seja, uma aplicação de IoT no âmbito industrial, onde os sistemas ciberfísicos estão interconectados a diversas tecnologias de forma a obter um controlo de rede sem fios, bem como fabricações avançadas e automatização fabril. As aplicações da IoT estão a crescer e a tornarem-se predominantes em muitos domínios de aplicação inteligentes como sistemas de saúde, cidades, redes, agricultura e sistemas de fornecimento. Da mesma forma, a IoT está a transformar estilos de vida e de trabalho e assim, a procura por produtos inteligentes está constantemente a aumentar. As grandes indústrias e startups competem entre si de forma a dominar o mercado com os seus novos serviços e produtos IoT, desbloqueando o valor de negócio da IoT. Apesar da sua crescente popularidade, benefícios e capacidades comprovadas, a IoT está ainda a dar os seus primeiros passos e é confrontada com muitos desafios. Entre eles, problemas de conectividade, compatibilidade/interoperabilidade entre dispositivos e sistemas, falta de padronização, gestão das enormes quantidades de dados e ainda falta de ferramentas para investigações forenses. No entanto, preocupações quanto ao estado de segurança e privacidade ainda estão entre os fatores adversos à adesão universal desta tecnologia. Estudos recentes revelaram que existem questões de segurança e privacidade associadas ao design e implementação de vários dispositivos IoT e aplicações inteligentes (smart apps.), isto pode ser devido ao facto, em parte, de que alguns fabricantes e empresas de desenvolvimento de dispositivos (especialmente startups) IoT e smart apps., recolham o valor de negócio dos grandes mercados IoT, negligenciando assim a importância da segurança, resultando em dispositivos IoT e smart apps. com carências e violações de segurança da IoT nos últimos anos. Esta tese aborda os desafios de segurança e privacidade que foram supra mencionados. Visto que a Internet e os sistemas informáticos tradicionais são por vezes considerados inseguros, os sistemas IoT tornam-se ainda mais inseguros, devido a restrições inerentes a tais dispositivos. Estas restrições são impostas devido ao custo, uma vez que se espera que muitos dispositivos de ponta sejam de baixo custo e descartáveis, com recursos energéticos limitados, bem como limitações na capacidade de armazenamento e computacionais, e redes com perdas devido a um desempenho de hardware de qualidade inferior, quando comparados com computadores convencionais. Uma das raízes do problema é o facto de que muitos fabricantes, startups e empresas de desenvolvimento destes dispositivos e smart apps não adiram ao conceito de segurança por construção, ou seja, logo na conceção, não preveem a proteção da privacidade e segurança. Assim, alguns dos produtos e dispositivos produzidos apresentam vulnerabilidades na segurança. Nos últimos anos, hackers maliciosos têm explorado diferentes vulnerabilidades de segurança nas infraestruturas da IoT, causando violações de dados e outros incidentes de privacidade envolvendo dispositivos IoT e smart apps. Estes têm atraído uma atenção significativa por parte das comunidades académica e industrial, que culminaram num grande número de propostas apresentadas por investigadores científicos. Ainda que as abordagens de pesquisa e os resultados variem entre os diferentes estudos, há um consenso e pré-requisito fundamental para enfrentar os desafios de privacidade e segurança da IoT, que buscam construir proteção de segurança e privacidade em dispositivos IoT e smart apps. desde o fabrico. Para esta finalidade, esta tese investiga como produzir segurança e privacidade destes sistemas desde a produção, e como principal objetivo, concentra-se em fornecer soluções que possam promover a conceção e o desenvolvimento de dispositivos IoT e smart apps., nomeadamente um conjunto de ferramentas chamado Consultor de Segurança da Plataforma de Hardware da IoT (IoT-HarPSecA). Espera-se que o conjunto de ferramentas forneça apoio a designers e programadores em startups durante a conceção e implementação destes sistemas ou que facilite a integração de mecanismos de segurança nos sistemas préexistentes. De modo a alcançar o objetivo proposto, recorre-se à seguinte abordagem. A primeira fase consiste num levantamento exaustivo de diferentes aspetos da segurança e privacidade na IoT, incluindo requisitos de segurança na arquitetura da IoT e ameaças à sua segurança, os seus domínios de aplicação e os ativos cibernéticos associados, a complexidade das vulnerabilidades da IoT e ainda possíveis contramedidas relacionadas com a segurança e privacidade. Evolui-se para uma breve visão geral das plataformas de desenvolvimento de hardware da IoT. As fases seguintes consistem na identificação dos desafios e questões associadas à IoT, que foram restringidos às questões de segurança e privacidade. As demais etapas abordam o processo de pensamento de conceção (design thinking), design e implementação e, finalmente, a avaliação do desempenho. O IoT-HarPSecA é composto por três componentes principais: a Obtenção de Requisitos de Segurança (SRE), Orientações de Melhores Práticas de Segurança (SBPG) e a recomendação de Componentes de Algoritmos Criptográficos Leves (LWCAR) na implementação de software e hardware. O autor implementou uma ferramenta em linha de comandos usando linguagem C++ que serve como interface entre os utilizadores e a IoT-HarPSecA. Esta tese apresenta ainda uma descrição detalhada, desenho e implementação das componentes SRE, SBPG, e LWCAR. Apresenta ainda cenários práticos do mundo real que demostram como o IoT-HarPSecA pode ser utilizado para elicitar requisitos de segurança, gerar boas práticas de segurança (em termos de recomendações de implementação) e recomendar algoritmos criptográficos leves apropriados com base no contributo dos utilizadores. De igual forma, apresenta-se a avaliação do desempenho destes três componentes, demonstrando que o IoT-HarPSecA pode servir como um roteiro para o desenvolvimento seguro da IoT

An Approach to Guide Users Towards Less Revealing Internet Browsers

When browsing the Internet, HTTP headers enable both clients and servers send extra data in their requests or responses such as the User-Agent string. This string contains information related to the sender’s device, browser, and operating system. Previous research has shown that there are numerous privacy and security risks result from exposing sensitive information in the User-Agent string. For example, it enables device and browser fingerprinting and user tracking and identification. Our large analysis of thousands of User-Agent strings shows that browsers differ tremendously in the amount of information they include in their User-Agent strings. As such, our work aims at guiding users towards using less exposing browsers. In doing so, we propose to assign an exposure score to browsers based on the information they expose and vulnerability records. Thus, our contribution in this work is as follows: first, provide a full implementation that is ready to be deployed and used by users. Second, conduct a user study to identify the effectiveness and limitations of our proposed approach. Our implementation is based on using more than 52 thousand unique browsers. Our performance and validation analysis show that our solution is accurate and efficient. The source code and data set are publicly available and the solution has been deployed