With the rapid development of health equipments, increasingly more patients have installed the implantable medical devices (IMD) in their bodies for diagnostic, monitoring, and therapeutic purposes. IMDs are extremely limited in computation power and battery capacity. Meanwhile, IMDs have to communicate with an external programmer device (i.e., IMD programmer) through the wireless channel, which put them under the risk of unauthorized access and malicious wireless attacks. In this paper, we propose a proxy-based fine-grained access control scheme for IMDs, which can prolong the IMD's lifetime by delegating the access control computations to the proxy device (e.g., smartphone). In our scheme, the proxy communicates with the IMD programmer through an audio cable, which is resistant to a number of wireless attacks. Additionally, we use the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) to enforce fine-grained access control. The proposed scheme is implemented on real emulator devices and evaluated through experimental tests. The experiments show that the proposed scheme is lightweight and effective.
Most existing works employ the two-party access control architecture, in which the IMD with constrained computational power, battery capacity and storage must perform the access control by itself, resulting in a relatively weak access control and shorter IMD lifetime. Some works proposed that the IMD should be accessible only to a group of trusted people (e.g., doctors, relatives) who have been added into the IMD's access control list (ACL) @cite_20 @cite_43 . The limited storage of IMD will greatly restrict the scalability of such schemes. In addition, the authentication of the requestor requires the verification of the certificate signature. The computing power and battery can hardly afford the public-key cryptographic computations.
@cite_43 @cite_20
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Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) are widely used to treat chronic diseases. Nowadays, many IMDs can wirelessly communicate with an outside programmer (reader). However, the wireless access also introduces security concerns. An attacker may get an IMD reader and gain access to a patient's IMD. IMD security is an important issue since attacks on IMDs may directly harm the patient. A number of research groups have studied IMD security issues when the patient is in nonemergency situations. However, these security schemes usually require the patient's participation, and they may not work during emergencies (e.g., when the patient is in comma) for various reasons. In this paper, we propose a light-weight secure access control scheme for IMDs during emergencies. Our scheme utilizes patient's biometric information to prevent unauthorized access to IMDs. The scheme consists of two levels: level 1 employs some basic biometric information of the patient and it is lightweight; level 2 utilizes patients' iris data for authentication and it is very effective. In this research, we also make contributions in human iris verification: we discover that it is possible to perform iris verification by comparing partial iris data rather than the entire iris data. This significantly reduces the overhead of iris verification, which is critical for resource-limited IMDs. We evaluate the performance of our schemes by using real iris data sets. Our experimental results show that the secure access control scheme is very effective and has small overhead (hence feasible for IMDs). Specifically, the false acceptance rate (FAR) and false rejection rate (FRR) of our secure access control scheme are close to 0.000 with suitable threshold, and the memory and computation overheads are acceptable. Our analysis shows that the secure access control scheme reduces computation overhead by an average of 58 . Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) have been widely used to treat chronic diseases such as cardiac arrhythmia and diabetes. Many IMDs are enabled with wireless communication capabilities and can communicate with an outside programmer reader wirelessly. With the rapid growth of IMDs, IMD security becomes a critical issue since attacks on IMDs may directly harm the patient. Typical IMDs have very limited resource in terms of energy, computation and storage. In this research, we identify a new kind of attacks on IMDs -Resource Depletion (RD) attacks that could deplete IMD resources (e.g., battery power) quickly. The RD attacks could reduce the lifetime of an IMD from several years to a few weeks. The attacks can be easily launched but can not be defended by traditional cryptographic approaches. In this paper, we propose to utilize the patient's IMD access pattern and we design a novel Support Vector Machine (SVM) based scheme to address the RD attacks. Our SVM-based scheme is very effective in defending the RD attacks. Our experimental results show that the average detection rate of the SVM-based scheme is above 90 . The use of radio for communication with medical devices provides important convenience and safety features. However, devices that respond to unauthorized queries may inadvertently disclose their presence. It is reasonable for users to expect that their devices' detectability by third parties to be limited, and thus even eavesdroppers to an authorized conversation (e.g. a command sent to an insulin pump) should observe an access code of minimal utility for triggering future transmissions. Access rights should be revocable in a manner that limits that harm that can be caused by authorized devices in the possession of unauthorized users. In order to detect inappropriate use, it may be desirable for access history to be available for audit. We describe a family of replay-attack resistant protocols suitable for embedding into query messages that can authorize users with a range of differentiated access rights. Implanted devices utilizing these techniques can evade detection by suppressing responses to queries that do not contain appropriate authorization. Techniques are described that can support revocation of authorization and audits of access history. Finally, we observe that the processing of unauthorized queries consumes power and thus can be used to mount a potentially devastating denial-of-service attack against the batteries of both conventional devices and devices that utilize the cryptographic protocols we describe. Since field-powered communication systems (e.g. HF-RFID) contain embedded general-purpose processors that operate using only power extracted from externally applied fields, they are substantially more robust against such forms of attack. Wireless Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs), including pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators, often have built-in wireless modules in order to facilitate non-invasive programming and data read-out; however, most IMDs lack a security mechanism. The unique challenge is that IMDs should be able to be accessed by doctors at any legitimate hospital for emergency purposes, but conventional security mechanisms using keys or credentials cannot guarantee that doctors could obtain keys timely in emergency situations. To address this unique challenge, we present an ECG-based Secret Data Sharing (ESDS) scheme for securing wireless IMDs which does not require pre-deployed keys or credentials. The ESDS scheme makes use of electrocardiograph (ECG) features to hide a secret within the IMD before transmission, and then reveal the secret with simultaneously measured ECG features by an external programmer. This scheme can protect IMDs against eavesdropping and other active attacks. In addition, the scheme uses an improved fuzzy vault scheme in which hash functions are substituted for chaff points to hide genuine points on a polynomial. This improvement saves IMD resources in terms of memory and communications, making the ESDS scheme lightweight. Performance analysis shows that the ESDS scheme meets our design goal of security.