Securing m-healthcare social networks: challenges, countermeasures and future directions

M-healthcare mobile social network has emerged as a promising next-generation healthcare system increasingly adopted by the US and European governments, with the rapid development of sensor and wireless communication technologies. In this paper, we describe the goals and tactics, and present a distributed architecture of m-healthcare social networks. Following each kind of security and privacy challenge, we define a series of basic and sophisticated cyber attacks and give substantial and promising solutions to satisfy the unique security and privacy requirements in m-healthcare social networks. Last but not least, several interesting open problems are pointed out with possible addressing ideas to trigger more research efforts in this emerging area.