The integration of Internet-of-Things and pervasive computing in medical
devices have made the modern healthcare system "smart". Today, the function of
the healthcare system is not limited to treat the patients only. With the help
of implantable medical devices and wearables, Smart Healthcare System (SHS) can
continuously monitor different vital signs of a patient and automatically
detect and prevent critical medical conditions. However, these increasing
functionalities of SHS raise several security concerns and attackers can
exploit the SHS in numerous ways: they can impede normal function of the SHS,
inject false data to change vital signs, and tamper a medical device to change
the outcome of a medical emergency. In this paper, we propose HealthGuard, a
novel machine learning-based security framework to detect malicious activities
in a SHS. HealthGuard observes the vital signs of different connected devices
of a SHS and correlates the vitals to understand the changes in body functions
of the patient to distinguish benign and malicious activities. HealthGuard
utilizes four different machine learning-based detection techniques (Artificial
Neural Network, Decision Tree, Random Forest, k-Nearest Neighbor) to detect
malicious activities in a SHS. We trained HealthGuard with data collected for
eight different smart medical devices for twelve benign events including seven
normal user activities and five disease-affected events. Furthermore, we
evaluated the performance of HealthGuard against three different malicious
threats. Our extensive evaluation shows that HealthGuard is an effective
security framework for SHS with an accuracy of 91% and an F-1 score of 90%.