BCG & ECG-based secure communication for medical devices in Body Area Networks

Abstract

An increasing amount of medical devices, such as pacemakers or insulin pumps, can communicate in wireless Body Area Networks (BANs). While this facilitates the interaction between users and medical devices, something that was previously more complicated or -in the case of implanted devices -often impossible, it also raises security and privacy questions. We exploit the wide availability of ballistocardiographs (BCG) and electrocardiographs (ECG) in consumer wearables and propose MEDISCOM, an ad-hoc, implicit, and secure communication protocol for medical devices in local BANs. Deriving common secret keys from a body's BCG or ECG signal, MEDISCOM ensures confidentiality and integrity of sensitive medical data. It also continuously authenticates devices, requiring no explicit user interaction and maintaining a low computational overhead. We consider relevant attack vectors and show how MEDISCOM is resilient towards them. Also, we validate the security of our protocol's secret keys on BCG and ECG data from 29 subjects.

Discrete-Time Hyperchaotic System Synchronization

“…Previously published results highlight the fact that complex emitter dynamics provide high security of the chaotically encrypted signal (Grigoraş and Grigoraş, 2017;Maqbool et al, 2017) leading to the study of hyperchaotic discrete-time systems as emitting element in the communication structure. Using the proposed approach to biomedical signal transmission, is confirmed in (Beck et al, 2021;Liao et al, 2021).…”

CardioID: Secure ECG-BCG Agnostic Interaction-Free Device Pairing

“…It uses them not just for confidentiality -i.e. encryption -but also as a means to provide data integrity and continuous authentication, leading devices to "unpair" once they are not anymore on the same body, i.e., observing the same BCG or ECG signal [54].…”