Detecting and mitigating cyberattacks using software defined networks for integrated clinical environments

The evolution of integrated clinical environments (ICE) and the future generations of mobile networks brings to reality the hospitals of the future and their innovative clinical scenarios. The mobile edge computing paradigm together with network function virtualization techniques and the software-defined networking paradigm enable self-management, adaptability, and security of medical devices and data management processes making up clinical environments. However, the logical centralized approach of the SDN control plane and its protocols introduce new vulnerabilities which affect the security of the network infrastructure and the patients’ safety. The paper at hand proposes an SDN/NFV-based architecture for the mobile edge computing infrastructure to detect and mitigate cybersecurity attacks exploiting SDN vulnerabilities of ICE in real time and on-demand. A motivating example and experiments presented in this paper demonstrate the feasibility of of the proposed architecture in a realistic clinical scenario.