SoK: Security and Privacy in Implantable Medical Devices and Body Area Networks

Abstract

Balancing security, privacy, safety, and utility is a necessity in the health care domain, in which implantable medical devices (IMDs) and body area networks (BANs) have made it possible to continuously and automatically manage and treat a number of health conditions. In this work, we survey publications aimed at improving security and privacy in IMDs and health-related BANs, providing clear definitions and a comprehensive overview of the problem space. We analyze common themes, categorize relevant results, and identify trends and directions for future research. We present a visual illustration of this analysis that shows the progression of IMD/BAN research and highlights emerging threats. We identify three broad research categories aimed at ensuring the security and privacy of the telemetry interface, software, and sensor interface layers and discuss challenges researchers face with respect to ensuring reproducibility of results. We find that while the security of the telemetry interface has received much attention in academia, the threat of software exploitation and the sensor interface layer deserve further attention. In addition, we observe that while the use of physiological values as a source of entropy for cryptographic keys holds some promise, a more rigorous assessment of the security and practicality of these schemes is required.

Device Pairing at the Touch of an Electrode

“…Some on-body or implantable medical devices use body channel communication to transmit and receive sensor readings, either to and from each other or to establish communication with an external device which is used to monitor and program the implantable devices. An extensive survey and overview of literature about the security and privacy of body area networks and implantable medical devices can be found in [25].…”

Problems of Information Security in E-Health

“…Malicious cyber attacks to WBSN can change the designated address of packages and disturb the routing, steal medical data by illegal listening to wireless communication environment, detect the location of patient and track his activities, make changes to data, create fake emergence signals in medical data, can carry out DoS-attacks (Denial of Service), interventions to physical devices and "jamming" attacks, side channel attacks, exhausting energy source -the battery, analogous sensor injection, and other attacks [32,33].…”

Privacy Data Decomposition and Discretization Method for SaaS Services

“…Therefore, these techniques can hardly be applied to satisfy user privacy protection requirements in a collaborative and transparent interaction environment. Most scholars use traditional information security methods, for instance, encryption or anonymity, to perform research on privacy data protection in cloud computing [5][6][7][8].…”