A Security Awareness and Protection System for 5G Smart Healthcare Based on Zero-Trust Architecture

TLDR

5G’s high bandwidth, low latency, and high concurrency enable advanced smart healthcare, yet legacy passive security mechanisms are inadequate for distributed, cloud‑edge‑terminal systems, making robust protection increasingly urgent. The authors propose a zero‑trust based security awareness and protection system for 5G smart medical platforms. The system builds dynamic access‑control models across subject, object, behavior, and environment dimensions to deliver real‑time situational awareness, continuous authentication, behavior analysis, and fine‑grained access control. Implementation and industrial‑grade testing confirm the system provides active defense and end‑to‑end security for data, users, and services in 5G smart medical systems.

Abstract

The key features of 5G network (i.e., high bandwidth, low latency, and high concurrency) along with the capability of supporting big data platforms with high mobility make it valuable in coping with emerging medical needs, such as COVID-19 and future healthcare challenges. However, enforcing the security aspect of a 5G-based smart healthcare system that hosts critical data and services is becoming more urgent and critical. Passive security mechanisms (e.g., data encryption and isolation) used in legacy medical platforms cannot provide sufficient protection for a healthcare system that is deployed in a distributed manner and fail to meet the need for data/service sharing across "cloud-edge-terminal" in the 5G era. In this article, we propose a security awareness and protection system that leverages zero-trust architecture for a 5G-based smart medical platform. Driven by the four key dimensions of 5G smart healthcare including "subject" (i.e., users, terminals, and applications), "object" (i.e., data, platforms, and services), "behavior," and "environment," our system constructs trustable dynamic access control models and achieves real-time network security situational awareness, continuous identity authentication, analysis of access behavior, and fine-grained access control. The proposed security system is implemented and tested thoroughly at industrial-grade, which proves that it satisfies the needs of active defense and end-to-end security enforcement of data, users, and services involved in a 5G-based smart medical system.