SecureSurgiNET: A framework for ensuring security in telesurgery

The notion of surgical robotics is actively being extended to enable telesurgery, where both the surgeon and patient are remotely located and connected via a public network, which leads to many security risks. Being a safety-critical application, it is highly important to make telesurgery robust and secure against active and passive attacks. In this article, we propose the first complete framework, called SecureSurgiNET, for ensuring security in telesurgery environments. SecureSurgiNET is primarily based on a set of well-established protocols to provide a fool-proof telesurgical robotic system. For increasing the efficiency of secured telesurgery environments, the idea of a telesurgical authority is introduced that ensures the integrity, identity management, authentication policy implementation, and postoperative data security. An analysis is provided describing the security and throughput of Advanced Encryption Standard during the intraoperative phase of SecureSurgiNET. Moreover, we have tabulated the possible attacks on SecureSurgiNET along with the devised defensive measures. Finally, we also present a time complexity analysis of the SecureSurgiNET through simulations.