Towards a Novel Framework for Reinforcing Cybersecurity using Digital Twins in IoT-based Healthcare Applications

Abstract

In recent years, the cybersecurity attacks on the internet of things (IoT)-based healthcare systems became the major concern for researchers and health organizations. With time, the sophistication of these attacks is increasing. Therefore, healthcare service providers must implement efficient security mechanisms carefully while taking the advantages of connected devices without compromising the patient safety and disturbing the real-time health services. A digital twin (DT) is a virtual representation of a real-time counterpart of a physical world. DT offers significant advantages to cybersecurity experts, empowering them to predict risks without entering the physical world, and to simulate and test cyber-attacks that would otherwise be infeasible to do in real-time in the physical environment. DT in healthcare helps to identify security vulnerabilities, conduct attack simulations, and potential security breaches by creating a virtual replica of the targeted healthcare systems. In this paper, a novel and automated conceptual framework is developed for reinforcing the cybersecurity in IoT-based healthcare using DT technology. It includes the conceptualization and analysis of the proposed framework which can provide dynamic and adaptive security solution to identify real-time threats and vulnerabilities in IoTbased healthcare applications.

Internet of Medical Things Security Frameworks for Risk Assessment and Management: A Scoping Review

“…The framework 31 for reinforcing cybersecurity offers a solution for testing security threats and risks without the need to stop the system by using the Digital twins (DT) tool. DT allows the representation of the physical world, predicts risks, simulates cyber attacks, assesses the impact, and identifies threats and vulnerabilities in the IoT healthcare environment.…”

“…Since it concerns the use of information technology in healthcare, which is one of the key sectors, further research is needed to cover this area. Most of the studies mentioned above point out the specificities of the IoMT, such as the heterogeneity of devices, 16,28,35,37,57 the rapid development and proliferation of new devices, 28,35,36,45,56 the large amount of sensitive data exchanged wirelessly, [34][35][36]56 the layered architecture 15,28,29,31,32,45,56,57 and the multitude of users who often lack security awareness. 23,24,27 It is important to note that this review focused only on finding and describing thematically relevant work and then answering the research questions.…”

Detecting latent topics and trends of digital twins in healthcare: A structural topic model-based systematic review

“…The framework is used in the facility management of Shanghai Tongji Hospital and achieved good results. Pirbhulal et al 56 proposed an automated DT framework for the cybersecurity of IoT healthcare systems. The agriculture simulated potential threats and vulnerabilities by generating DT of IoT systems, preventing possible cyberattacks, and improving the resistance of IoT healthcare systems to attacks and overall security.…”

Systematic Literature Review: Digital Twins’ Role in Enhancing Security for Industry 4.0 Applications

“…An automated framework for improving cybersecurity in IoT-based healthcare applications using Digital Twin that includes innovative healthcare security techniques such as system modeling, traffic, and attack generation, impact assessment, attack and response strategies, and cyber-attack prevention processes proposed by Pirbhulal et al [4].…”