Analysis on Vulnerability of Home Healthcare Medical Devices and Development of Protection Profile Based on Common Criteria Version 3.1

Recently, there has been increased interest in home healthcare service due to prosperity of information technology and distribution of developed medical devices. Home healthcare service is a service that enables patients to receive medical service at home, without visiting a hospital. However, since the insecurely processed information can directly affect patients' health and lives, security must be taken into consideration. In this paper, we discuss the vulnerabilities and threats to consolidate security and reliability of home healthcare service, and propose a protection profile for home healthcare medical devices based on Common Criteria.

I. Introduction

There has been increased interest in home healthcare service. Such service includes “u-Care service for solitary senior citizen,” [1] which provides medical service to patients who are not comfortable with receiving full medical service. The rapidness and convenience in medical service to doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and patients are primary pros of home healthcare service. However, there are privacy issues regarding patients' information in home healthcare service, and the insecurely processed information can affect patients' health and lives directly. To alleviate this problem systemically, the United States government and European member states adopt Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) [13] and Regulation (EC) 45/2001 [14], respectively along with guidelines. Nevertheless, other than security assessment guidelines, there is no protection profile which covers components of home healthcare service, for example, home healthcare medical devices, Decision Support System for Home Healthcare (DSSH). Therefore, in this paper, we discuss the vulnerabilities and threats to consolidate security and reliability of home healthcare service, and propose a protection profile for home healthcare medical devices based on Common Criteria. This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we briefly describe a background on home healthcare service, and discuss known vulnerabilities and threats in home healthcare service. Then in section 3, we propose a protection profile for home healthcare medical devices covering issues we discussed in the previous section in Section 2. Finally, we summarize and conclude our research in Section 4.