Emerging Security Mechanisms for Medical Cyber Physical Systems

Area of Science:

• Cybersecurity
• Health Informatics
• Applied Cryptography

Background:

• Remote health monitoring systems using body-worn devices are rapidly advancing.
• Medical Cyber Physical Systems (MCPS) transmit sensitive health data to the cloud for analysis.
• Ensuring the security and privacy of this medical data is a critical design concern.

Purpose of the Study:

• To survey encryption schemes for securing Medical Cyber Physical Systems (MCPS).
• To evaluate the suitability of conventional and emerging encryption methods for different MCPS layers.
• To analyze the trade-offs between advanced features and overhead in MCPS security.

Main Methods:

• Depiction of a four-layer MCPS architecture: data acquisition, aggregation, cloud processing, and action.
• Survey and categorization of encryption schemes based on security functions (storage, sharing, computation).
• Experimental evaluation of encryption schemes focusing on performance and resource utilization.

Main Results:

• Different MCPS layers require tailored encryption due to varying hardware and communication capabilities.
• Emerging encryption schemes provide enhanced capabilities like secure data sharing and computation.
• These advanced schemes introduce substantial computational and storage overhead, impacting usability.

Conclusions:

• The usability of emerging encryption schemes in MCPS is limited by their significant overhead.
• Future research should focus on optimizing these schemes for practical MCPS implementation.
• Balancing advanced security features with resource constraints is essential for future remote health monitoring systems.