Transaction on IoT and Cloud Computing 2014 Security and privacy challenges for healthcare

How secure are your healthcare records at the hospital? Nobody would want to see their aunt’s mammogram end up on some website without her consent or her identity stolen and debt taken in her name. With widespread use of Smartphones and innovations in wearable sensors such as Nike Fitbit [1] and wristworn Pulse Oximeter, Ambulatory Heart and Blood Pressure Monitors [2], we envision a future where people will regularly wear sensors to monitor their health and fitness. Health related data collected over a long span of time can be very helpful to doctors in diagnosing and treating patients. This data can help athletes improve their performance. There are numerous applications of health related data collected and shared with healthcare providers. However we foresee numerous security and privacy related threats to this data. Breach of this data violates patient privacy and puts liability on hospitals. We are one incident away from an attack on healthcare related data similar to Snowden event [3] or Target event [4]. This paper outlines our interdisciplinary research project aimed at building secure and private wear-able sensors