Cybersecurity vulnerability analysis of medical devices purchased by national health services.

The growing integration of software within medical devices introduces the potential for cybersecurity threats. How significant is this risk, and to what extent are citizens currently exposed? In this study, we adopt a new data-gathering methodology using datasets provided in Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS). This allowed us to perform an extensive analysis across over 36 countries within a 12-year range, searching 92 million public administration purchase records for potentially vulnerable medical devices. The findings reveal a concerning landscape wherein numerous medical devices purchased by national health services possessed or still possess 661 distinct vulnerabilities-more than half of which are deemed critical or high-severity. These vulnerabilities enable relatively simple attacks to impact data confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility severely. Even if patches were applied immediately upon discovery, these vulnerabilities would still result in roughly 3.2 years of system exposure from the time a device is purchased until a software vulnerability is announced, with all classes of devices affected, including high-risk IIB and III devices which accounts for 74% of instances. While a full analysis requires interactivity, this noninvasive methodology enables a large-scale study, emphasizing the need to move faster from the safety to the security of medical devices.

Privacy-Aware Architectures for NFC and RFID Sensors in Healthcare Applications.

World population and life expectancy have increased steadily in recent years, raising issues regarding access to medical treatments and related expenses. Through last-generation medical sensors, NFC (Near Field Communication) and radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies can enable healthcare internet of things (H-IoT) systems to improve the quality of care while reducing costs. Moreover, the adoption of point-of-care (PoC) testing, performed whenever care is needed to return prompt feedback to the patient, can generate great synergy with NFC/RFID H-IoT systems. However, medical data are extremely sensitive and require careful management and storage to protect patients from malicious actors, so secure system architectures must be conceived for real scenarios. Existing studies do not analyze the security of raw data from the radiofrequency link to cloud-based sharing. Therefore, two novel cloud-based system architectures for data collected from NFC/RFID medical sensors are proposed in this paper. Privacy during data collection is ensured using a set of classical countermeasures selected based on the scientific literature. Then, data can be shared with the medical team using one of two architectures: in the first one, the medical system manages all data accesses, whereas in the second one, the patient defines the access policies. Comprehensive analysis of the H-IoT system can be useful for fostering research on the security of wearable wireless sensors. Moreover, the proposed architectures can be implemented for deploying and testing NFC/RFID-based healthcare applications, such as, for instance, domestic PoCs.

The Design of an Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Node for Tracking Pink Iguanas.

The design of wireless sensor nodes for animal tracking is a multidisciplinary activity that presents several research challenges both from a technical and a biological point of view. A monitoring device has to be designed accounting for all system requirements including the specific characteristics of animals and environment. In this work we present some aspects of the design of a wireless sensor node to track and monitor the pink iguana of the Galápagos: a recently discovered species living in remote locations at the Galápagos Islands. The few individuals of this species live in a relatively small area that lacks of any available communication infrastructure. We present and discuss the energy harvesting architecture and the related energy management logic. We also discuss the impact of packaging on the sensor performance and the consequences of the limited available energy on the GPS tracking.