How to Secure IoT Enabled Healthcare Devices

The Healthcare industry has made a remarkable qualitative improvement with the development of IoT. IoT devices offer many benefits for several stakeholders, particularly improved healthcare for patients, productivity and cost savings for the manufacturer and real-time analyzing for healthcare professionals. A report from Vectra for 2019 specified the worldwide adoption of health IoT devices and says that most medical device IoT security violations do not come from outside interference, but from within (59% vs. 42%) which means human error generates threats more frequently than the targeted actions of attackers.

To assure the safety of patient data, the FDA revealed new draft guidance that addresses the steps must follow in order to secure medical devices against cyberattacks. Device manufacturers, OEM / chip makers and device designers must recognize, analyze and overcome the challenges so that the implementation of smart connected IoT medical technologies can be attained. Let’s learn in detail what threats IoT medical device security gaps can cause and how to protect connected medical devices from the consequences.

Complete Control of your Network and Regulate an Inventory

Managing your whole network is the prime element means to handle the visibility of the network, i.e., analyze it for breaches to minimize risks. The network has intelligence, scanners and a bunch of various solutions for giving the highest quality protection against cyber attacks. Unfortunately, many healthcare authorities are not even informed about how many medical devices are connected to their networks so analyzing and managing risks related to these devices is a huge challenge.

What makes this so firm is the dynamic nature in which devices are initiated and removed from the environment. It’s essential that organizations build a process to acquire the needed visibility in order to assemble actionable intelligence based on the associated risk.

Focus on your Governance

A huge privacy concern for IoT devices is hackers and security violations. The GDPR initiates a required notification; personal data breaches must be declared within 72 hours. The significance of bad security now gets to every facet of the business. Thus, security should be served as a business issue and considered properly. Health systems must assure that sound security decisions are being involved at every extent of the business. 

The dynamic between Clinical Engineering (CE), IT as well as security is distinct in every organization. Organizations must embrace remarkable technical and organizational measures to signify compliance with the GDPR and manage data protection impact assessments. Set the standard for securing delicate patient data. Any organization that deals with protected health information (PHI) must assure that the needed physical, network and process security considerations are in place and must be followed.

Outline a Cybersecurity Strategy

It is essential that health systems should establish a priority to get the essentials of risk management and cybersecurity practices to improve the security view. Healthcare industries should analyze their current overall security strategy to interpret how and where connected medical devices fit in. Healthcare industries need to place a system in a position that analyzes the behaviors of these devices by recognizing irregularities in real-time.

While human interaction is a required part of a security strategy, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are now very effective defense strategies that should be part of the plan. Keeping the privacy of patient records and data is most important to healthcare. A security violation is not just data loss; it is the safety concern.

Authentication and Authorization

1. Try to avoid hardcoded or common credentials
2. Each device should have isolated credentials Provision identities that can be cryptographically verified.
3. Utilize a Public or Private Root Certificate Authority to issue device certificates
4. Use Hardware security model with server-side applications to protect unauthorized access.
5. Utilize multi-factor authentication for user access.
6. Assure that users are validated when accessing devices.

Set up a Workflow Process

It is important to initiate a workflow process to address the security issues if any IoT device is acting abnormally. And the same concept should be included in your general security plan. Unfortunately, many industries still follow a relatively inefficient and time-consuming workflow process. There are various workflow approaches, containing setting up an alert protocol to prioritize and address critical concerns that can be used.

Whatever process your corporation chooses, make sure everyone on the team surely understands their role, what they are personally responsible for and how the process binds into your organization’s larger security process. When working with IoT connected devices, you should generate a separate network to analyze them carefully. Segmentation and centralization of devices will enable them to attain flexibility in their control, offering the opportunity to alternate these methods based on the threat. It is recommended to utilize IoT aggregation hubs for further device control.

Trojan and Malware Solutions

There are various malware protection methods that you can utilize successfully:
• Signature-based detection is a well-known method based on an antivirus system signature. Signatures are checked in the database and when no equivalence is found, malware is detected. This method is not fit for devices with a small amount of memory.
• Static methods are depending on the static characteristics of the device. The usual static analysis searches for malware without the actual code change, utilizing several tools for identification and collection of simple signatures. It is low in resources but bounded in verification.
On the other side, dynamic detection discovers malware by monitoring suspicious activity, which involves CPU load, network behavior, virtual memory, calls, etc. The exact way to secure is to consider the integration of static and dynamic detections.

Healthcare industries must maintain a balance between securing connected medical devices and eventually securing patient data. When configuring a connected medical device, every time consider security and privacy from the beginning – at the design stage preferably. This guide has offered you a good grounding in security for connected medical devices.