Security Issues in Healthcare 4.0

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the usage of Healthcare 4.0-based diagnostics systems across the globe. In healthcare 4.0, the patient’s records are stored in electronic health record (EHR) repository either at the centralized or distributed location to help the Doctors to easily access the patient’s healthcare data from anywhere at any time. As this data is accessed from the database repository using an open channel, i.e., the Internet, so, security and privacy are major concerns while accessing it from any location. In the era of multitasking, where we have many accounts in all different sort of domains, it makes it difficult for us to remember different passwords at the same time. However, for our convenience, if we set the same password for all of our different accounts, it renders all our accounts vulnerable as compromising anyone would mean compromising all. For example in emergencies, if you have forgotten your password, then it is very problematic. Thus, the biometrics-based authentication scheme is beneficial compared to password-based systems. Biometric features are not changed, lost, shared and may not be required to remember. Motivated from these facts, in this approach, we propose a biometric-based authentication scheme to ensure secure access of the patients EHR from any location. In the proposal, we first identified various security threats and challenges in accessing EHR from the database repository. Then, the secure biometric-based scheme is designed which is validated using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool. The results obtained demonstrated that the proposed scheme is superior (in terms of computation and communication costs) in comparison to the traditional state-of-the-art existing schemes. Keywords: Security, Biometric, Healthcare system, Wearable device, Mobile device