Secure Remote Health Monitoring with Unreliable Mobile Devices

Abstract

As the nation’s healthcare information infrastructure continues to evolve, new technologies promise to provide readily accessible health information that can help people address personal and community health concerns. In particular, wearable and implantable medical sensors and portable computing devices present many opportunities for providing timely health information to health providers, public health professionals, and consumers. Concerns about privacy and information quality, however, may impede the development and deployment of these technologies for remote health monitoring. Patients may fail to apply sensors correctly, device can be stolen or compromised (exposing the medical data therein to a malicious party), low-cost sensors controlled by a capable attacker might generate falsified data, and sensor data sent to the server can be captured in the air by an eavesdropper; there are many opportunities for sensitive health data to be lost, forged, or exposed. In this paper, we design a framework for secure remote health-monitoring systems; we build a realistic risk model for sensor-data quality and propose a new health-monitoring architecture that is secure despite the weaknesses of common personal devices. For evaluation, we plan to implement a proof of concept for secure health monitoring.