A cyber warfare perspective on risks related to health IoT devices and contact tracing

Cited by: 5; All Open Access, Bronze Open Access, Green Open Access

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Abstract: The wide use of IT resources to assess and manage the recent COVID-19 pandemic allows to increase the effectiveness of the countermeasures and the pervasiveness of monitoring and prevention. Unfortunately, the literature reports that IoT devices, a widely adopted technology for these applications, are characterized by security vulnerabilities that are difficult to manage at the state level. Comparable problems exist for related technologies that leverage smartphones, such as contact tracing applications, and non-medical health monitoring devices. In analogous situations, these vulnerabilities may be exploited in the cyber domain to overload the crisis management systems with false alarms and to interfere with the interests of target countries, with consequences on their economy and their political equilibria. In this paper we analyze the potential threat to an example subsystem to show how these influences may impact it and evaluate a possible consequence. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.

Author Keywords: COVID-19; Cyber warfare; IoT; Risk analysis; Security

Bibtex citation:

@ARTICLE{Bobbio202313823,
    author = "Bobbio, Andrea and Campanile, Lelio and Gribaudo, Marco and Iacono, Mauro and Marulli, Fiammetta and Mastroianni, Michele",
    title = "A cyber warfare perspective on risks related to health IoT devices and contact tracing",
    year = "2023",
    journal = "Neural Computing and Applications",
    volume = "35",
    number = "19",
    pages = "13823 – 13837",
    doi = "10.1007/s00521-021-06720-1",
    type = "Article"
}

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