PMsec 2.0: A Security-By-Design Solution for Doctor’s Dilemma Problem in Smart Healthcare

The rapid adoption of Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) has revolutionized e-health systems, particularly in remote patient monitoring. With the growing adoption of Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) in delivering technologically advanced health services, the security of Medtronic devices is pivotal as the security and privacy of data from these devices are directly related to patient safety. PUF has been the most widely adopted hardware security primitive which has been successfully integrated with various Internet-of-Things (IoT) based applications, particularly in smart healthcare for facilitating device security. To facilitate security and access control to IoMT devices, this work proposes a novel cybersecurity solution using PUF for facilitating global access to IoMT devices. The proposed framework presents an approach that enables the patient’s body area network devices supported by PUF to be securely accessible and controllable globally. The proposed cybersecurity solution has been experimentally validated using state-of-the-art SRAM PUF, a delay based PUF, and a trusted platform module (TPM) primitive.

I. Introduction

The evolution of Telemedicine, e-Health, and m-Health for delivering sophisticated medical services is being made possible through the application of IoMT devices. These smart Medtronic devices facilitate physiological data sensing and collection. However, openly accessible IoMT devices can be maliciously tampered with and controlled easily thereby enabling adversaries to control Medtronic devices on patients. Implementation of cryptographic security schemes has proven to be unreliable due to the requirement of non-volatile memory for storing the secret keys which again can be vulnerable to various kinds of advanced security attacks [1], [2]. Security-by-Design (SbD) is a novel phenomenon that emphasizes integrating security and privacy primitives at the design stage of a consumer electronics system. The objective of SbD is ensuring the security of smart electronics systems with security/privacy primitive as functionality enabled by default in its working [3]. It also specifies that security/privacy specifications should not be complicated and must be understandable for the ease of use of a consumer electronic system.