Modern hospitals may have thousands of network-connected medical devices that do everything from monitoring patients’ hearts to infusing lifesaving drugs. Protecting those devices from cybersecurity attacks is a time-consuming task for information security (InfoSec) staff at every hospital.

A new project underway at Georgia Tech aims to help hospital staff protect those devices while providing critical information about the overall security of the networks on which they operate. Funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), the Hospital-Integrated Vulnerability Identification and Proactive Remediation (H-VIPER) project will help hospital InfoSec staff find, track, and fix potential security risks in medical devices used to deliver patient care.

“Today, it is very hard to know which devices are vulnerable, how urgent each vulnerability is, and whether fixing a device might disrupt patient care,” said Brendan Saltaformaggio, the project’s principal investigator and an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “H-VIPER will create a digital twin of a hospital’s network and devices, giving InfoSec teams a safe way to proactively find vulnerable devices, build and test fixes, and understand the impact of those fixes before deploying them.”

Read the full story on the Georgia Tech Research Institute's website.