Abstract
Smart healthcare environments are growing at a rapid pace due to the services and benefits offered to healthcare practitioners and to patients. At the same time, smart healthcare environments are becoming increasingly complex environments where a plethora of devices are linked with each other, to deliver services to patients, and they require special security measures to protect the privacy and integrity of user data. Moreover, these environments are exposed to various kinds of security risks, threats, and attacks. Firewalls are considered as the first line of defense for securing smart healthcare networks and addressing the challenges mentioned above. Firewalls are applied at different levels in networks, and range from conventional server-based to cloud-based firewalls. However, the selection and implementation of a proper firewall to get the maximum benefit is a challenging task. Therefore, understanding firewall types, the services offered, and analyzing underlying vulnerabilities are important design considerations that need addressing before implementing a firewall in a smart healthcare environment. The paper provides a comprehensive review and best practices of firewall types, with offered benefits and drawbacks, which may help to define a comprehensive set of policies for smart healthcare devices and environments.
Highlights
The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) with smart healthcare devices brought many opportunities and challenges
If NGWF is a piece of equipment able to enforce network security policies through the application of all traditional firewall capabilities introduced before, in a sort of all-in-one body set of rules [38], the implementation of sophisticated intrusion prevention systems (IPS), the ability to interact as an autonomous body from Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) level 2 to level 7 of OSI layer, makes next-generation firewalls (NGFW) a powerful firewall, on the other hand
The personal firewall is the last sub-category of proxy firewalls operating at OSI level 7, being an application recently used in software as a service (SaaS) cloud environments
Summary
The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) with smart healthcare devices brought many opportunities and challenges. In addition to traditional “information systems” implemented in healthcare networks, the growth of the IoT paradigm allows various mobile devices and sensors to be part of a healthcare network for monitoring these systems and patients in real-time, and make these networks more vulnerable and increase the probability of cyberattacks [1]. Such attacks usually target sensitive healthcare records that affect the safety and privacy of patients, and threaten the integrity of the data.
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