IRS-Driven Cybersecurity of Healthcare Cyber Physical Systems

Abstract

Intelligent reflective surface (IRS) as one of the most potential 6G key technologies injects new vitality into the smart medical and health system by intelligently configuring the wireless communication environment and spawns the construction of a modern medical information system. Medical data security is a sensitive issue that hospitals are generally concerned about in recent years. There are great hidden dangers to information security in the environment of “cloud storage”. The IRS provides a new solution for enhancing the privacy and security of “cloud storage” medical file data, assisting in the efficient transmission and interconnection of information, and ensuring highly secure and uninterrupted services in healthcare-based cyber physical systems (CPS). Specifically, the modelling in this paper considers the situation where communication over multiple-input single-output (MISO) channel is eavesdropped by a patient spy holding a single antenna receiver, and additionally the patient spy is obscured by an obstacle. One of the multi-antenna base stations (BS) transmits independent data streams to doctors and keeps them secret from patient spies. By jointly optimizing the beamforming at the BS and the phase shift of the IRS reflection elements, the simulation analysis verifies that the introduction of IRS can effectively improve the privacy security of medical data.