Swarm Intelligence Model for Securing Healthcare Ecosystem

The healthcare sector is constantly facing challenges in ensuring security due to the sophisticated attacks by the threat actor for acquiring sensitive patient data. An attack on the system can pose any potential risk to the business continuity. The increased use of information technology in the modern healthcare system makes medical devices and systems more vulnerable to exploitation and possible cyber-security attacks. This paper proposes a flexible and decentralized cyber-security model based on the integration of multi-agent systems and swarm intelligence for tackling the propagation of attacks inside interconnected healthcare organizations and ensuring the whole healthcare ecosystem's security and resilience. The proposed model is based on the collaboration between the agents with different functions and cognitive capabilities, named primary and supervisor agents. Primary agents are lightweight BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) agents implementing a minimum set of capabilities for monitoring a specific area of the healthcare system; supervisor agents incorporate an extended version of the BDI reasoning to provide advanced capabilities for securing the overall healthcare system by enabling collective intelligence and overall cyber-security awareness. The preliminary experimental results show that the model is robust and responsive for securing the ecosystem.