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Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack in Cloud- Assisted Wireless Body Area Networks: A Systematic Literature Review

  • Systems-Level Quality Improvement
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Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have emerged as a promising technology that has shown enormous potential in improving the quality of healthcare, and has thus found a broad range of medical applications from ubiquitous health monitoring to emergency medical response systems. The huge amount of highly sensitive data collected and generated by WBAN nodes requires an ascendable and secure storage and processing infrastructure. Given the limited resources of WBAN nodes for storage and processing, the integration of WBANs and cloud computing may provide a powerful solution. However, despite the benefits of cloud-assisted WBAN, several security issues and challenges remain. Among these, data availability is the most nagging security issue. The most serious threat to data availability is a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that directly affects the all-time availability of a patient’s data. The existing solutions for standalone WBANs and sensor networks are not applicable in the cloud. The purpose of this review paper is to identify the most threatening types of DDoS attacks affecting the availability of a cloud-assisted WBAN and review the state-of-the-art detection mechanisms for the identified DDoS attacks.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to extend their sincere appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University  for its funding of this research through the Research Group Project no. RG-1435-048. The authors would also like to thank the National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan, for its support during this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Haider Abbas

  2. National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Rabia Latif & Haider Abbas

  3. Telecom Ecole de Management, Information System Department Institut Mines-Télécom, Paris, France

    Saïd Assar

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  1. Rabia Latif
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  2. Haider Abbas
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  3. Saïd Assar
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Correspondence to Haider Abbas.

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“This article is part of the Topical Collection on Systems-Level Quality Improvement”

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Latif, R., Abbas, H. & Assar, S. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack in Cloud- Assisted Wireless Body Area Networks: A Systematic Literature Review . J Med Syst 38, 128 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-014-0128-8

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