Cybersecurity attacks on medical IoT devices for smart city healthcare services

Smart city is an emerging concept whose main goal is to improve the quality of life of its citizens by leveraging Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) as the key medium. In this context, smart city healthcare can play a pivotal role toward the improvement of citizens’ quality of life, since it can allow citizens to be provided with personalized e-health services, without limitations on time and location. In smart city healthcare, medical Internet of Things (IoT) devices constitute a key underlying technology for providing personalized e-health services to smart city patients. However, despite the significant advantages that IoT medical device technology brings into smart city healthcare, medical IoT devices are vulnerable to various types of cybersecurity threats and thus, they pose a significant risk to smart city patient safety. Based on that and the fact that the security is a critical factor for the success of smart city healthcare services, novel security mechanisms against cyberattacks of today and tomorrow on IoT medical devices are required. Toward this direction, the first step is the comprehensive understanding of the existing cybersecurity attacks on IoT medical devices. Thus, in this chapter, we will provide a categorization of cybersecurity attacks on medical IoT devices which have been seen in the wild and can cause security issues and challenges in smart city healthcare services. Moreover, we will present security mechanisms, derived from the literature, for the most common attacks, as well as highlight emerging good practice and approaches that manufacturers can take to improve medical IoT device security throughout its life cycle. In this chapter, the authors’ intent is to provide a foundation for organizing research efforts toward the development of the proper security mechanism against cyberattacks targeting IoT medical devices.