Cross-Domain Security Asset Management for Healthcare

Healthcare is one of the most peculiar between all Critical Infrastructures due to its context and role in the society. The characteristics of openness and pervasive usage of IT systems and connected devices make it particularly exposed to both physical threats, such as theft and unauthorized access to restricted areas, and cyber attacks, like the notorious wannacry ransomware that abruptly disrupted the British National Health System in May 2017. Even the recent COVID-19 pandemic period has been negatively characterized by an increase of both physical and cyber incidents that specifically targeted hospitals and undermined an essential public service like healthcare. Effective security solutions are necessary in order to protect and enhance the resiliency of the Critical Infrastructures. This paper presents the work being developed in the context of the SAFECARE H2020 project, that specifically considers the requirements for security of hospitals. A particular focus is given to the asset management that consider cross-domain aspects of security, like the physical location and virtual connections that link different components of a hospital. This allows advanced knowledge that enables to infer and forewarn of possible elaborated cyber-physical kill chains. This is particularly important and useful during crisis, as allows to have a holistic overview of the status of the hospital and the potential impacts of one or more incidents to the critical assets. The description and simulation of an attack scenario is also given, together with the description of the messages exchanged by the security systems and the information made available to security operators.