Security Challenges in the eHealth Domain: The VICINITY Approach Maria Belesioti 1* , Evangelos Sfakianakis 1 , Viktor Oravec 2 , Athanasios Tryferidis 3 , Kostis Kaggelides 4 , Ioannis P. Chochliouros 1 , Maria Koutli 3 and Dimitrios Tzovaras 3 1 Hellenic Telecommunications Organization S.A. (OTE), Fixed Network R&D Programs Section, Athens, Greece {mbelesioti, esfak, ichochliouros}@oteresearch.gr 2 bAvenir, s.r.o., Bratislava, Slovakia (viktor.oravec@bavenir.eu) 3 CERTH/ITI - Centre for Research and Technology Hellas/Information Technologies Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece {thanasic, mkoutli, dimitrios.tzovaras}@iti.gr 4 Gnomon Informatics S.A., Thessaloniki, Greece (k.kaggelides@gnomon.com.gr) Abstract—The eHealth constitutes the largest wave of change in the sector of healthcare. In this context, Internet of Things is of immense importance since connected data would facilitate treatment with more efficiency and comprehensive knowledge and would “act” as preventive medicine. Monitoring health data and making them ubiquitously accessible to predefined and authorized healthcare personnel are shared through various IoT platforms, which usually lack IoT-protocol-interoperability. In this paper, we present the impact of IoT systems in the eHealth services’ evolution and we introduce the VICINITY ecosystem solution. Its high-level architecture is analyzed and several security considerations are offering “thought for food”. Keywords— Internet of Things (IoT), healthcare, eHealth, interoperability, decentralization, assisted living I. INTRODUCTION The most important advantage of today’s growing technology investments should be adopted to make living smarter and more e-centric. It is anticipated that more than 75 billion devices will be connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020 [1] and that billions of sensors and actuators will be connected to the Internet via heterogeneous access networks enabled by modern technologies such as real-time and semantic web services. The Internet of Things is envisioned to allow interconnectivity of anyone and at anytime and anyplace assisting, at the same time, our interaction with the environment by linking the web with different wearables and working devices such as medical devices. The IoT concept was coined by a member of the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) development community in 1999, and it has recently become more relevant to the practical world because of the growth of mobile devices, embedded and ubiquitous communication, cloud computing and data analytics [2]. Nowadays, IoT is been applied in areas such as home monitoring and automation, healthcare, energy and utilities, smart grid, intelligent transportation systems and traffic management. Regarding healthcare, the use of IoT could be particularly useful due to the recent advances of information and communication technologies and can have great impact to both remote monitoring of patients and preventive medicine sectors. More specifically, eHealth applications are of high interest due to their capability to improve accessibility with parallel reduction of healthcare cost and, most importantly, without discounts in the quality of life of patients. Easy, quick and secure access to quality healthcare services is important for increasing everyone’s quality of health, preventing disease and disability, detecting and treating health conditions, and maybe preventing death due to time strains. Section II provides a fundamental overview of the essential VICINITY approach, by briefly discussing the proposed high-level architecture, decentralization issues and proposed eHealth use cases. Section III refers to actual IoT challenges in the eHealth environment. Then, section IV focuses upon security considerations affecting the eHealth domain. Section V summarizes the work and predicts for next steps. II. THE VICINITY APPROACH VICINITY (“Open virtual neighbourhood network to connect intelligent buildings and smart objects”) is an H2020 research and innovation project that aims at addressing the challenging objective of an interoperable IoT ecosystem that will allow collaboration of IoT platforms towards the creation of virtual neighbourhoods. This section presents the technical “key points” of the VICINITY concept and the envisioned eHealth use case that will demonstrate the applicability of the proposed solution. A. High Level Architecture Current IoT infrastructure acts as isolated islands in the global IoT landscape while inter-connection of these “islands” might bring significant added value (such as an ecosystem running on close-to-zero energy, for example). The high-level concept of the VICINITY framework is outlined in Fig.1, below. As indicated in the respective figure, guest IoT infrastructures, VICINITY enabled services 219 2019 15th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS) 2325-2944/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE DOI 10.1109/DCOSS.2019.00057