They can hear your heartbeats: non-invasive security for implantable medical devices

By Shyamnath Gollakota, Haitham Hassanieh, Benjamin Ransford, Dina Katabi, Kevin Fu. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2011

407 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Wireless communication has become an intrinsic part of modern implantable medical devices (IMDs). Recent work, however, has demonstrated that wireless connectivity can be exploited to compromise the confidentiality of IMDs' transmitted data or to send unauthorized commands to IMDs---even commands that cause the device to deliver an electric shock to the patient. The key challenge in addressing these attacks stems from the difficulty of modifying or replacing already-implanted IMDs. Thus, in this paper, we explore the feasibility of protecting an implantable device from such attacks without modifying the device itself. We present a physical-layer solution that delegates the security of an IMD to a personal base station called the shield. The shield uses a novel radio design that can act as a jammer-cum-receiver. This design allows it to jam the IMD's messages, preventing others from decoding them while being able to decode them itself. It also allows the shield to jam unauthorized commands---even those that try to alter the shield's own transmissions. We implement our design in a software radio and evaluate it with commercial IMDs. We find that it effectively provides confidentiality for private data and protects the IMD from unauthorized commands.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d9dd0dd873101bd3eb3ad70fdda94a18d295d134

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Citations in the corpus

Full duplex radios (2013, background): “First, since the main signal component is being transmitted at 20dBm (100mW), self-interference from the linear main component is 20 − (−90) = 110dB above the receiver noise floor.”
Cyber-Physical Systems Security—A Survey (2017, background): “Target a political ﬁgure by tampering with ICD conﬁgurations (CP) [134] Zero power encryption mechanism (C) [56] or wearable devices (CP) [34], [51], [165] Smart Cars Thieves (P) Tampering (P) [64], [162] FDI (C) [64], [80] Hardware-based security measures [39], [161] Criminal (C) RKE system (P)…”
Classifications and Applications of Physical Layer Security Techniques for Confidentiality: A Comprehensive Survey (2019, methodology): “In [310], another external device assisted PLS method against eavesdropping was”
Cyber-physical systems security: Limitations, issues and future trends (2020, unknown): “Gollakota et al. [129] and Halperin et al. [130] exploited the Implantable Cardioverter Deﬁbrillator (ICD) wireless vulnerabilities through injection attacks.”
A Survey of IoT-Enabled Cyberattacks: Assessing Attack Paths to Critical Infrastructures and Services (2018, background): “According to the advisory, patients must visit their doctors in order to update the embedded ﬁrmware due to security reasons [200]. a) Attacks based on IMD/WMD devices: The security of wearable and implantable medical devices has been studied in various works in the past [201]–[206].”
Applications of self-interference cancellation in 5G and beyond (2014, background): “Every future radio, from WiFi [4] to military grade jammers [9], can benefit from this technology.”