Security threats against the transmission chain of a medical health monitoring system

Abstract

One of the most important aspects of a wireless health monitoring system is the security of data. In this paper, security attacks against the complete transmission chain of a medical health monitoring system are enumerated and classified based on their threat to three security principles: confidentiality, integrity and availability. The communication chain is divided in a standard way into three tiers and relevant threats are identified for each tier. Security requirements corresponding to these threats are presented. It is noted that end-to-end security is not feasible due to distributed computing and the incompatibility of the data standards of different tiers.