e-SAFE: Secure, Efficient and Forensics-Enabled Access to Implantable Medical Devices

Abstract

To facilitate monitoring and management, modern Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) are often equipped with wireless capabilities, which raise the risk of malicious access to IMDs. Although schemes are proposed to secure the IMD access, some issues are still open. First, pre-sharing a long-term key between a patient's IMD and a doctor's programmer is vulnerable since once the doctor's programmer is compromised, all of her patients suffer; establishing a temporary key by leveraging proximity gets rid of pre-shared keys, but as the approach lacks real authentication, it can be exploited by nearby adversaries or through man-in-the-middle attacks. Second, while prolonging the lifetime of IMDs is one of the most important design goals, few schemes explore to lower the communication and computation overhead all at once. Finally, how to safely record the commands issued by doctors for the purpose of forensics, which can be the last measure to protect the patients' rights, is commonly omitted in the existing literature. Motivated by these important yet open problems, we propose an innovative scheme e-SAFE, which significantly improves security and safety, reduces the communication overhead and enables IMD-access forensics. We present a novel lightweight compressive sensing based encryption algorithm to encrypt and compress the IMD data simultaneously, reducing the data transmission overhead by over 50% while ensuring high data confidentiality and usability. Furthermore, we provide a suite of protocols regarding device pairing, dual-factor authentication, and accountability-enabled access. The security analysis and performance evaluation show the validity and efficiency of the proposed scheme.

APSec1.0: Innovative Security Protocol Design with Formal Security Analysis for the Artificial Pancreas System

“…Chi et al’s protocol [ 14 ] e-SAFE aims to provide secure, efficient, and forensics-enabled access to IMDs. The system uses a smartphone as a proxy to undertake most of the security-related tasks and establishes a trusted channel between the IMD and the smartphone by sharing a secret key derived from a master key that is physically inaccessible to attackers.…”

Can Formal Security Verification Really Be Optional? Scrutinizing the Security of IMD Authentication Protocols

“…This protocol [25] uses a compressing-based encryption mechanism and public key infrastructure, and other cryptographic protocols, such as RSA, AES, and HMAC. The protocol comprises three participants-IMD, smartphone, and programmer.…”

“…Next, we used two well-known security verification approaches, BAN logic [21] and AVISPA [22], to formally analyze the authentication protocols. Unfortunately, many security protocols designed for IMDs are not formally verified, or they use only one verification method [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30].…”

IMDfence: Architecting a Secure Protocol for Implantable Medical Devices

“…Chi et al [10] propose a protocol that relies on the patient's smartphone for the reader access. However, requiring the patient to be in possession of this additional device (i.e., the smartphone) all the time, including during emergencies, puts a significant burden on the patient.…”