Guest editorial: Secure cloud computing for mobile health services

Seamless availability of medical and biological data to legitimate users is the top concern for healthcare systems that are being managed electronically. This demand, as a result, has paved multiple ways for modern technologies deployment in telemedicine and mobile healthcare services. The cloud computing technology deployment in healthcare systems is also considered as a part of the same initiative that has provided numerous benefits to this area. However, at the same time this also gave rise to the possibility of sensitive data exposure by various unpredictable threats associated with cloud computing technology. This threat landscape becomes more critical when it comes to the sensitive data and services management of a healthcare system. As noticed through the recent incidents, the healthcare systems are vulnerable to multiple threats, that may have serious impact on the healthcare working environment, safety of operations, patient’s data privacy and secure transmissions of medical data. Some of the reasons for these threats are the inherited or disguised vulnerabilities that evolve with time and are present in the cloud deployment models; public or private, as well as the service delivery models; Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Therefore, by the time these critical healthcare systems would rely on the newly deployed cloud technology, the existing vulnerabilities would have adversely affected these systems. In recent years, due to these security flaws, many healthcare organizations confronted undesired consequences in terms of reputation and losing public confidence. Although cloud security efforts and technologies have significantly evolved, however there still remains a need to address the novel threats that are continuously emerging and becoming complex with time. With evil intentions, these threats tend to pose repeated and sophisticated security attacks, which as a result continuously introduce malicious software and compromise the patient’s data privacy and healthcare security. The aim of this special issue was to attract original and the latest contributions, and to review and survey research and development on information assurance, data privacy and applications security in mobile healthcare systems. We received 16 articles, and each article was rigorously reviewed by at least three experts and finally we selected seven articles for publication. The paper entitled BData Damage Assessment and Recovery Algorithm from Malicious Attacks in HealthCare Data Sharing Systems^ by Ramzi A. Haraty, Mirna Zbib and Mehedi Masud presents data damage assessment and * Haider Abbas haidera@kth.se