Cyber Physical Security Solutions for Pervasive Health Monitoring Systems - E-Healthcare Systems and Wireless Communications - page 145

Chapter 7
Cyber Physical Security
Solutions for Pervasive
Health Monitoring Systems
Krishna K. Venkatasubramanian
University of Pennsylvania, USA
Sidharth Nabar
University of Washington, USA
Sandeep K. S. Gupta
Arizona State University, USA
Radha Poovendran
University of Washington, USA
ABSTRACT
With a rapidly aging population, the healthcare community will soon face severe medical personnel
shortage and rising costs. Pervasive Health Monitoring Systems (PHMS) can help alleviate this situ-
ation. PHMS provides continuous real-time monitoring of a person's health using a (usually wireless)
network of medical and ambient sensors/devices on the host (patients), called Body Area Networks
(BANs). The sensitive nature of health information collected by PHMS mandates that patient's privacy
be protected by securing the medical data from any unauthorized access. The authors' approach for
addressing these issues focuses on a key observation that PHMS are cyber-physical systems (CPS).
Cyber-physical systems are networked, computational platforms, deeply embedded in specific physical
processes for monitoring and actuation purposes. In this work, they therefore present a novel perspec-
tive on securing PHMS, called Cyber Physical Security (CYPSec) solutions. CYPSec solutions are
environmentally-coupled security solutions, which operate by combining traditional security primitives
along with environmental features. Its use results in not only secure operation of a system but also the
emergence of additional “allied” properties which enhance its overall capabilities. The principal focus
of this chapter is the development of a new security approach for PHMS called CYPsec that leverages
their cyber-physical nature.