International Journal of Information Security - Call for Papers: Special issue on Cybersecurity in Healthcare

Overview

For the past few years, we have observed a wave of cyberattacks touching healthcare environments, particularly hospitals. Many hospitals have been disabled due to cyber-attacks, for weeks and sometimes months, with impacts ranging from GDPR infringements to loss of human life. This is bringing to light the increased reliance of healthcare environments on digital infrastructures, and consequently, their significantly increased attack surface. Healthcare environments have specificity that makes them particularly difficult in terms of cybersecurity. First, they are highly distributed, making them very open, with remote offices that are deployed to increase care efficiency (up to home care). Second, it is very hard to introduce segmentation and access control, as efficient communication is of the utmost importance and these classic cybersecurity techniques induce overhead. Third, users of the medical infrastructure (doctors, nurses, patients) are considering digital infrastructures for their practical use and are not digital specialists; they thus are likely to fall prey to malicious actors. Fourth, medical devices and platforms are subject to many regulations, which make compliance complicated.

This special issue is looking to provide a view of the state of the art on the topic of cybersecurity for healthcare environments.
Topics of interest for this special issue include (but are not limited to):

Cyberthreats in healthcare environments
Cybersecurity of medical devices and environments
Medical data protection and access
Protection of medical applications
Threat detection, incident response, mitigation and remediation in healthcare environments
Security assessment of healthcare environments
Best practices for data protection in healthcare: GDPR compliance, HIPAA compliance, encryption, and access controls
The role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in healthcare cybersecurity
Legal and ethical considerations in healthcare cybersecurity: patient privacy, consent, and data governance
Cybersecurity contributions applicable to healthcare environments

Schedule

Full paper submission: 30 September 2023

First round of review notification: 30 December 2023

Revised paper submission: 15 February 2024

Final decision notification: 15 April 2024

Planned publication: TBD

Guest Editors
Hervé Debar, Télécom SudParis, Institut Polytechnique de Paris (herve.debar@telecom-sudparis.eu)

Hervé Debar has been active in the cybersecurity domain for over 30 years, leading research and development activities in the private and public sector. He is one of the inventors of the Security Information and Event Management domain, which is now largely used for operational security purposes in many companies worldwide. He is the author of over a hundred scientific papers on cybersecurity, holds several patents, and has served as an editor for the IETF standard document on security message exchange format.

Hervé Debar is currently Professor at Institut Mines-Télécom – Télécom SudParis – Institut Polytechnique de Paris (TSP) since October 2009. He formerly was the head of the networks department, and is currently the dean for research. Before joining TSP, he spent 10 years as an expert researcher in Orange, after holding industry R&D positions with IBM, Dassault and CS.

Hervé Debar obtained an engineering degree in telecommunications in 1990 from Institut National des Télécommunications, a PhD in computer science from the University of Paris 6 in 1993, and a habilitation thesis from the University of Caen in 2006.

Konstantinos Fysarakis, Sphynx Analytics Ltd. (fysarakis@sphynx.ch)

Konstantinos Fysarakis is the CTO of Sphynx Analytics Ltd. In the past he was the CTO of Sphynx Technology Solutions AG, as well as an R&D Engineer / Researcher for the Technical University of Crete (TUC), the Hellenic Aerospace Industry (HAI), the Telecommunication Systems Research Institute (TSI), the Foundation of Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), and the Hellenic Mediterranean University (HMU). At the latter he also taught Information Security -focused undergraduate and postgraduate modules for several years.

Throughout his career he has been involved in over 20 research projects (FP7, Horizon & national) and has authored/co-authored over 60 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications focusing on the Security, Privacy, Dependability and Sustainability of embedded systems and ubiquitous smart platforms (over 1400 citations, according to Google Scholar).

He also enjoys working on industry-related tasks, dealing with Information Security Management (being an IRCA certified ISO 27001:2005 auditor) and operational security topics (Cyber Threat Intelligence, Security automation, orchestration & response, etc.).

Theofanis (Theo) Fotis (tfotis16@gmail.com)

Dr Theofanis (Theo) Fotis, Air Force Officer Nurse veteran, is a Reader at the School of Sport & Health Sciences and Deputy Director of the Centre for Secure, Intelligent and Usable Systems (CSIUS) at the University of Brighton, UK.

He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), and former Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Anaesthetic and Recovery Nursing (BJARN).

He is currently the Academic Lead of the Brighton and Hove Digital Health Living Lab, where citizens, health professionals and industry are working side by side on health innovation through co-creation. The project has been included in the National Initiative MADEatUNI, as one of the 100+ leading ways universities are saving lives and keeping public health, creating healthier lifestyles and a fairer society.

Theo is an international scholar in the health sciences with an h-index of 11 and over 300 citations and his funding portfolio includes Horizon2020, Interreg2Seas, The Catapult, AHSN and AfPP. In 2015 he used the term “Digital Nursing,” to define a future workforce of healthcare practitioners with the specialised knowledge and skills to utilise digital technologies for patient and citizen benefit. As a recognition of his work, in 2018 he was named one of the Top 50 Healthcare IT leaders in Europe by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS Europe), the largest health IT membership organisation in the world.

He is an active member of international bodies and committees including the International Task Force for Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform (TIGER HIMSS International), the Cybersecurity Privacy and Security committee (HIMMSS International) and the Phi Mu Chapter of the Sigma Theta Tau International Honour Society of Nursing.

He has extensive experience acting as an evaluator for national and international funding bodies including EPSRC, NIHR, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. In addition, he acts as an external evaluator for Higher Education quality assurance organisations, including the National Commission for Academic Accreditation and Assessment (NCAAA) of Saudi Arabia and the Commission for Academic Accreditation (CAA) of the United Arab Emirates.

●   HEIR (https://heir2020.eu/ (this opens in a new tab))
●   ASCAPE (https://www.ascape-project.eu/ (this opens in a new tab))
●   AI4HealthSec (https://www.ai4healthsec.eu/ (this opens in a new tab))
●   SMART BEAR (https://www.smart-bear.eu/ (this opens in a new tab))
●   IntellIoT (https://intelliot.eu/ (this opens in a new tab))
●   SECANT (https://secant-project.eu/ (this opens in a new tab))

Submission guidelines
All papers must be prepared in accordance with the Journal guidelines: https://www.springer.com/journal/10207/submission-guidelines (this opens in a new tab)

Submitted papers should present original, unpublished work, relevant to one of the topics of the special issue. All manuscripts will be subject to the Journal’s rigorous peer review policy, by at least two independent reviewers. This evaluation will cover the following aspects, but will not be limited to: relevance, significance of contribution to the field, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation. It is the policy of the journal that no submission, or substantially overlapping submission, be published or be under review at another journal or conference at any time during the peer review process.

Author Resources
Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has neither appeared in, nor is under consideration by other journals. Springer provides a host of information about publishing in a Springer Journal on our Journal Author Resources (this opens in a new tab) page, including Springer’s Peer Review Policy (this opens in a new tab) and Editorial Policies (this opens in a new tab), FAQs (this opens in a new tab), Tutorials (this opens in a new tab)along with Help and Support (this opens in a new tab).

International Journal of Information Security - Call for Papers: Special issue on Cybersecurity in Healthcare

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