Security Mechanism Based on Hospital Authentication Server for Secure Application of Implantable Medical Devices

Abstract

After two recent security attacks against implantable medical devices (IMDs) have been reported, the privacy and security risks of IMDs have been widely recognized in the medical device market and research community, since the malfunctioning of IMDs might endanger the patient's life. During the last few years, a lot of researches have been carried out to address the security-related issues of IMDs, including privacy, safety, and accessibility issues. A physician accesses IMD through an external device called a programmer, for diagnosis and treatment. Hence, cryptographic key management between IMD and programmer is important to enforce a strict access control. In this paper, a new security architecture for the security of IMDs is proposed, based on a 3-Tier security model, where the programmer interacts with a Hospital Authentication Server, to get permissions to access IMDs. The proposed security architecture greatly simplifies the key management between IMDs and programmers. Also proposed is a security mechanism to guarantee the authenticity of the patient data collected from IMD and the nonrepudiation of the physician's treatment based on it. The proposed architecture and mechanism are analyzed and compared with several previous works, in terms of security and performance.

Brainjacking: Implant Security Issues in Invasive Neuromodulation

“…The information technology community has given some degree of recognition to medical implant information security vulnerabilities, as detailed in Secure implant design, but the topic has only been discussed seriously in the biomedical literature recently [27][28][29] and there are no detailed discussions of the risks specific to neurological implants beyond a single forward-thinking but brief review published several years ago 3 .…”

“…Several design constraints exist that necessitate trade-offs between neurosecurity and other desirable features of IPGs. These trade-offs and challenges, along with specific methods of attack and desirable security features for future devices, have been discussed in greater detail elsewhere [27][28][29][77][78][79] , therefore this section will consider the factors most relevant to clinical practice -battery life and practicality.…”

“…Several potential security solutions exist although, as detailed below, many are subject to limitations. Specific solutions include improved auditing 84 , rolling code cryptography 77 , server-based cryptographic key management 28 , formal verification of device software 85 , proximity-based authentication 86,87 , and "communication cloaker" or "shield" wearable devices that mediate secure communication between programmer and implant 88,89 . For more detail, see Camara et al (2015) 27 .…”

A Secure and Investigation aware Smart Healthcare Cyber Physical System

“…To deal with these concerns, several approaches protecting IMDs were proposed in the literature. In [1,5], a 3-tier architecture, which integrates in addition to the IMDs and the programmers, an Authentication Server, was proposed. This server allows authenticating programmers and distributing credentials (useful for establishing secure communication with the IMD).…”

Method for Detecting Core Malware Sites Related to Biomedical Information Systems

“…Various types of cyber-attacks have recently been attempted on biomedical information systems [1, 2]. This is mainly because the personal records included in biomedical systems represent valuable financial information.…”