Towards a Novel Framework for Reinforcing Cybersecurity using Digital Twins in IoT-based Healthcare Applications

Abstract

In recent years, the cybersecurity attacks on the internet of things (IoT)-based healthcare systems became the major concern for researchers and health organizations. With time, the sophistication of these attacks is increasing. Therefore, healthcare service providers must implement efficient security mechanisms carefully while taking the advantages of connected devices without compromising the patient safety and disturbing the real-time health services. A digital twin (DT) is a virtual representation of a real-time counterpart of a physical world. DT offers significant advantages to cybersecurity experts, empowering them to predict risks without entering the physical world, and to simulate and test cyber-attacks that would otherwise be infeasible to do in real-time in the physical environment. DT in healthcare helps to identify security vulnerabilities, conduct attack simulations, and potential security breaches by creating a virtual replica of the targeted healthcare systems. In this paper, a novel and automated conceptual framework is developed for reinforcing the cybersecurity in IoT-based healthcare using DT technology. It includes the conceptualization and analysis of the proposed framework which can provide dynamic and adaptive security solution to identify real-time threats and vulnerabilities in IoTbased healthcare applications.