Modeling, Detecting, and Mitigating Threats Against Industrial Healthcare Systems: A Combined Software Defined Networking and Reinforcement Learning Approach

The rise of the Internet of Medical Things introduces the healthcare ecosystem in a new digital era with multiple benefits, such as remote medical assistance, real-time monitoring, and pervasive control. However, despite the valuable healthcare services, this progression raises significant cybersecurity and privacy concerns. In this article, we focus our attention on the IEC 60 870-5-104 protocol, which is widely adopted in industrial healthcare systems. First, we investigate and assess the severity of the IEC 60 870-5-104 cyberattacks by providing a quantitative threat model, which relies on Attack Defence Trees and Common Vulnerability Scoring System v3.1. Next, we introduce an intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS), which is capable of discriminating and mitigating automatically the IEC 60 870-5-104 cyberattacks. The proposed IDPS takes full advantage of the machine learning (ML) and software defined networking (SDN) technologies. ML is used to detect the IEC 60 870-5-104 cyberattacks, utilizing 1) Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol network flow statistics and 2) IEC 60 870-5-104 payload flow statistics. On the other side, the automated mitigation is transformed into a multiarmed bandit problem, which is solved through a reinforcement learning method called Thomson sampling and SDN. The evaluation analysis demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed IDPS in terms of intrusion detection accuracy and automated mitigation performance. The detection accuracy and the F1 score of the proposed IDPS reach 0.831 and 0.8258, respectively, while the mitigation accuracy is calculated at 0.923.

Automated summary

The rise of the Internet of Medical Things brings both benefits and concerns to the healthcare ecosystem. This article focuses on the IEC 60 870-5-104 protocol and investigates its cyberattacks. It proposes an intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS) that can automatically detect and mitigate these attacks. The IDPS utilizes machine learning and software defined networking technologies, achieving high accuracy and performance.