Security and Privacy for Healthcare Technologies

Dear Colleagues,

Nothing is more private than information about one’s health. Matters of the security and privacy of one’s medical data are often the furthest things from one’s consideration when dealing with medical matters. Further, many new types of personal, health information are being generated as medical practitioners are adopting new technologies to support healthcare, diagnostics, well-being monitoring, doctor prescription preferences, and other health-related information. Likewise, hospitals are deploying new infrastructure and cutting-edge technology to support new approaches to treatment, including advanced imaging devices, surgical robots and genetic profiling for biomarkers. The end result is that patients, healthcare providers, and pharmaceutical organizations are creating (and will continue to create) vast amounts of data that crosses communication networks, gets stored in the cloud, analyzed by remote experts (possible in the form of non-human, deep learning algorithms), used to control dosages, etc.

Unfortunately, with all of this data being created, it has become increasingly difficult to know where the data is going, what information is leaked unintentionally, or how such information could be used to cause harm to one’s health or one’s privacy. Sadly, the unfortunate truth is that there are adversaries out there trying to steal medical data, and this can have significant implications on our global society, ultimately threatening the quality of healthcare being delivered to patients. In order to protect patients and healthcare practitioners, it is critically important that the security and privacy problems facing the next generation of cyber-enabled healthcare are addressed through a holistic approach that involves the development of new security and privacy technologies, the collaboration between security practitioners and public policy makers, and ultimately the sharing and adoption of best practices by the security and healthcare communities.

This Special Issue aims to attract a combination of research articles that convey new security and privacy technologies, educational survey articles that help advance the adoption and practice of cybersecurity technologies by the broader healthcare community, and informative articles that cross the boundaries between public and legal aspects related to cybersecurity and privacy in healthcare.

The goal of this Special Issue is to strengthen the relationship between the security/privacy research and the development community and those in the healthcare and medical practice communities, with the ultimate objective being to lead to better solutions and practices to protect patients and their private information.

This Special Issue is soliciting papers on topics related to security and privacy in healthcare, including, but not limited to

• Authentication in healthcare systems
• Privacy-preserving referral systems
• Implementation of secure healthcare information exchange systems
• Cryptographic techniques in healthcare
• Fine-grained access control in healthcare systems
• Advanced health data methods for controlling and maintaining data security and privacy
• Multi-level access control policies and enforcement for healthcare databases
• Privacy-preserving techniques for healthcare data
• Privacy and genetic testing data analysis
• Secure and privacy-preserving data exchanges between healthcare stakeholders (e.g., patients, providers, insurance, pharma)
• Security in the medical cloud
• Security and privacy concerns in deep-learning based diagnostics and drug discovery
• Securing medical sensors and the Internet of Medical Things
• Protecting insulin pumps and other cyber-enabled implantable medical devices
• HIPAA and other public policies for protecting personal health information
• Threat analysis and preliminary threat diagnosis of healthcare systems
• Securing robotic surgery devices
• Transactions and blockchains in healthcare

Prof. Dr. Wade Trappe
Prof. Dr. Yingying Chen
Prof. Dr. Wenyuan Xu
Dr. Rebecca Herold
Dr. Jiang Bian
Guest Editors

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