MedKnights - Towards Secure and Flexible Medical IoT (IoMT) Infrastructure using Generative Adversarial Network
Overview
With growing healthcare demands, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has grown significantly in recent years and is dominating the healthcare industry. However, these smarter and advanced medical devices are “more” complicated in terms of software and hardware, with several defects and vulnerabilities that have been found and can lead to possible malicious attacks. Healthcare organizations are the new focus of attackers for carrying out IoMT-focused cyberattacks, which are becoming more common. In recent years, ransomware and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are malware-based popular attacks on IoMT devices. Cyberattacks and disruptions in clinical care can have a catastrophic effect on patient safety, which trickles down to the medical staff’s responsiveness. Moreover, because different medical devices have varying vital capabilities, it is critical to enable differentiated network services for these devices with varying critical levels of operation under network dynamics. Hence, it becomes crucial to efficiently detect and identify any malicious network activities to eliminate or minimize the impact of these attacks, as well as to detect and identify network traffics belonging to different medical equipment.
Figure 1: The proposed MedKnight platform.
This project is motivated by the enormous and exponentially increasing need for developing more secure and efficient medical networks and devices. We address a challenging research problem of societal importance. The proposed project aims at extending the knowledge in networking, machine learning, and digital forensic domains in developing a holistic framework MedKnights that can be deployed at the network edge components (such as WiFi access points, network switches, etc.) and effectively support different fine-grained security services of IoMT networks and devices. The proposed MedKnights scope and objectives are shown in Fig. 1. One of the main project objectives is to construct a real-world medical network testbed incorporating various types of IoMT devices that allows us to conduct various medical scenarios and conditions in order to assess and analyze the many proposed components of MedKnights. The second objective of this proposed is to develop novel GAN-based tools that will be able to efficiently classify and identify network traffic of individual IoMT devices and to detect and prevent any suspicious activities and potential attacks. Because hackers can always find a way around security measures, the next objective of MedKnights is to effectively be able to monitor and classify the operations and activities of IoMT devices to detect any malicious behaviors of the devices. The last objective is to enable memory forensic investigation of IoMT devices to corroborate intrusion detection.
People
PIs
PhD Students
- Mohammed Ayyat
- Santosh Kumar Nukavarapu
Funding
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NSF OAC 2212424: "OAC Core: MedKnights - Towards Secure and Flexible Medical IoT (IoMT) Infrastructure using Generative Adversarial Network”
Publications
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Nukavarapu, Santosh and Nadeem, Tamer. "iKnight - Guarding IoT infrastructure using Generative Adversarial Networks". (Under journal preparation/submission