Guest Editorial: Introduction to the Special Section on Emerging Security Trends for Biomedical Computations, Devices, and Infrastructures

UNLIKE the traditional usage models for embedded systems security, nowadays, emerging computing systems are embedded in every aspect of human lives. One of the emerging usage models in which security is vital is deeplyembedded computing systems in human bodies, e.g., implantable and wearable medical devices. In addition to the security threats to traditional embedded systems, emerging deeply-embedded computing systems exhibit a larger attack surface, prone to more serious or life-threatening attacks. Biomedical deeply-embedded systems (deployed in human body, with computer programs sending and receiving medical data and performing data mining for the decisions) are currently getting developed with rapid rate and tremendous success. Moreover, the security/privacy issues in every aspect of bioinformatics (algorithmic, statistical, and the like) including secure and private big data analytics, acquisition, and storage, privacy-preserving data mining for biomedicine, secure machine-learning of bioinformatics, and security of hardware and software systems used for biological databases are emerging given their unique constraints. Many of the systems for such computations will need to be transparently integrated into sensitive environments – the consequent size and energy constraints imposed on any security solutions are extreme. Thus, unique challenges arise due to the sensitivity of computation processing, need for security in implementations, and assurance “gaps.” This special section contains four papers chosen after an extensive review process. The first paper, “Emerging Security Mechanisms for Medical Cyber Physical Systems” by O. Kocabas, T. Soyata, andM.K. Aktas is motivated by the importance ofMedical Cyber Physical Systems (MCPS) security. The paper depicts the general architecture of an MCPS consisting of four layers: data acquisition, data aggregation, cloud processing, and action. Due to the differences in hardware and communication capabilities of each layer, different encryption schemes are used to guarantee data privacy within that layer. Such emerging encryption schemes enable exciting new features such as secure sharing and secure computation, whose overhead need to be considered closely. The second paper “Authentication of Medicines Using Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance Spectroscopy” by C. Chen, F. Zhang, J. Barras, K. Althoefer, S. Bhunia, and S. Mandal focuses on a chemometric passport-based approach to improve the security of the pharmaceutical supply chain. The method is based on applying nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) spectroscopy to authenticate the contents of medicine packets. The paper describes several advanced NQR techniques, including two-dimensional measurements, polarization enhancement, and spin density imaging, that further improve the security of the authentication approach. The third paper “Private Data Analytics on Biomedical Sensing Data via Distributed Computation” by Y. Gong, Y. Fang, and Y. Guo proposes and experimentally studies a scheme that keeps the training samples privatewhile enabling accurate construction of predictive models, considering logistic regression models which are widely used for predicting dichotomous outcomes in healthcare. Experimental results based on real datasets show that the scheme is highly efficient and scalable to a large number ofmobile health users. The fourth paper “Security Assessment of Cyberphysical Digital Microfluidic Biochips” by SK. Subidh Ali, M. Ibrahim, O. Sinanoglu, K. Chakrabarty, and R. Karri provides the first assessment of the security vulnerabilities of digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs). Two practical result-manipulation attacks are shown on a DMFB platform performing enzymatic glucose assay on serum. Then, the authors identify denial-of-service attacks, where the attacker can disrupt the assay operation by tampering either with the dropletrouting algorithm or with the actuation sequence. Finally, the guest editors would like to express their thanks to the authors of all submitted papers and the referees for their outstanding review in a timely manner. This special section would not have been possible without the support of Prof. Xu, TCBB’s editor-in-chief, who stood behind our effort on this special section. They would also like to thank Ms. Joyce Arnold, TCBB’s Peer Review Support Specialist, for her help throughout this project.