Security Issues for IoT Healthcare Applications: Recent Trends and Practices

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid and emerging surge of Internet of Things (IoT) healthcare applications has caught the attention of everyone and already knocked on the doors of almost every field. The widely spreading applications of IoT have inspired different domains, e.g., digital healthcare, bioinformatics, and cybernetics, with innovative trends and practices. In addition to providing comforts, happiness, and facilities at economic rates, there are various associated critical challenges, especially in maintaining security and privacy during sharing of secret and sensitive information in healthcare domains. In addition, the ease and fairness of resource allocation in the different intelligent platforms that IoT has brought to the modern world cannot even avoid threats, eavesdropping, and information leakage resulting from activities of hackers and attackers in the current digital healthcare landscape. Various aspects of such challenges are still unanswered, particularly in the medical field. Currently, IoT interconnects the Internet with sensors and different tiny portable devices by adopting an IP-enabled communication pattern. IoT has also played a significant role in revolutionizing the healthcare sector by providing state-of-the-art facilities, such as the remote monitoring of patients, aging and assisted living management, childcare, etc. Hence, secure and private content delivery strategies are the cornerstones of IoT application.

Most of the applications, as mentioned earlier, are highly dependent on intelligent and self-adaptive sensor-oriented entities. Sensor-based smart medical devices monitor patient health at a reasonable and efficient pace through providing correct detection and direction. The self-adaptive features of IoT-driven wearable devices empower innovative and pervasive healthcare with high-security demands to replace the conventional methods. In addition, modern security provisioning trends are more efficient in rectifying the different cyber attacks, threats, and intruders. One of the examples is compromised patient on-/in-body information during device-to-device communication from physicians to medical centers/theaters and from healthcare giving centers/nursing staff to the patients.

In establishing this Special Issue, I was inspired by the rapidly increasing security risks we all face, from wearable device manufacturers, IT professionals, and hardware/software engineers to firewall and security ensuring departments. To effectively rectify the attacks and threats in the present IoT-enabled healthcare era, this Special Issue will focus on the notion of recent advanced trends in secure, private, and trusted IoT for healthcare applications. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following fields:

• AI-driven methods for resource allocation in secure edge computing applications
• Energy efficient and secure ambient assisted living
• QoS/QoE monitoring in private and secure mobile healthcare applications
• Secure antenna design methods for body-centric medical health
• Trusted power-aware Bio-Nano and MEMS frameworks for Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
• Blockchain technologies for reliable and trustworthy computing
• Secure narrowband IoT
• Biometric security for medical applications
• Physiological based data authentication protocols for health monitoring
• Resource-constrained security solution for healthcare systems
• Lightweight authentication and data encryption methods
• Physical layer security for IoT
• Blockchain enabled secure system for digital healthcare
• Cybernetics body area network for the healthcare system
• Fraud detection techniques for healthcare applications
• ML as a solution and risk factor for IoT security

Dr. Ali Hassan Sodhro
Dr. Sandeep Pirbhulal
Dr. Abdullah Lakhan
Guest Editors

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• IoT security
• serverless scheduling
• fraud detection
• digital healthcare
• fog computing
• cloud computing
• biometric
• cybernetics