Energy Cyber Attacks to Smart Healthcare Devices: A Testbed

The Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a subject of intense interest among the research and industrial community as it has significantly impacted human life. The rapid growth of IoT technology has revolutionized human life by inaugurating the concept of smart healthcare, smart devices, smart city, and smart grid. The security of IoT devices has become a serious concern, especially in the healthcare domain, where recent attacks exposed damaging IoT security vulnerabilities. In addition, in IoT networks where the connected devices are vulnerable to attacks such as attacks that affect the resource constraints of healthcare devices, e.g., energy consumption attacks. Therefore, this paper defines the impact of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and Fake Access Points (F-APs) attacks on WiFi smart healthcare devices and investigates in detail how these attacks can be deployed toward victim devices and Access Points (APs). Our work focuses on IoT devices’ connectivity and energy consumption when under attack. The main key findings of this paper are as follows: (i) the minimum and maximum attack rate of DDoS attacks that cause service disruptions on the victim side, and (ii) the minimum-the higher effect of energy-consumption Distributed Denial of Service (EC-DDoS) and F-APs attacks on the energy consumption of the smart healthcare devices. Our study reveals the communication protocols, attack rates, payload sizes, and victim devices’ ports state as the vital factors in determining the energy consumption of victim devices. These findings facilitate a thorough understanding of IoT devices’ potential vulnerabilities within a smart healthcare environment and pave solid foundations for future studies on defense solutions.