NEMECYS: Addressing Challenges to Building Security Into Connected Medical Devices

The European health care system is moving toward personalised, distributed, and home-based services. This is made possible via new and improved connected medical devices (CMDs), and will benefit health care providers in terms of reduced cost and improved service. Patients will see improved quality of life in terms of reduced travel time and reduced stress via treatment at home or where they want it. However, for these benefits to be fully realised, the cybersecurity of CMDs needs to be ensured. This paper presents a brief survey of challenges to building security into CMDs, and introduces NEMECYS, an EU-funded project which will help practitioners to (a) comply with Medical Device (MD) regulations; (b) be able to apply proportionate MD cybersecurity, and (c) build in cybersecurity by design for both MDs and the connected scenarios they operate in.