Mitigating network-layer security attacks on authentication-enhanced openICE

Abstract

Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) is a standardized framework for achieving medical device interoperability. It utilizes high-level supervisory and medical apps and low-level communication middle-ware to coordinate medical devices to accomplish a shared clinical mission. With the potential to significantly improve healthcare productivity and reduce medical errors, the interoperability of medical devices also subjects ICE systems to unprecedented security threats. In this paper, we present a set of security attacks, namely interception, tampering, and replay attack, to the network level of ICE systems, which we identify through a threat modeling analysis on OpenICE, the best-known instantiation of ICE system. For these security attacks, we devise corresponding defense mechanisms on top of OpenICE. Our experiments demonstrate that these defense mechanisms can effectively protect OpenICE from the identified attacks with acceptable computational overhead.