Defending Resource Depletion Attacks on Implantable Medical Devices

Hei, Xiali; Du, Xiaojiang; Wu, Jie; Hu, Fei

doi:10.1109/glocom.2010.5685228

Cited by 100 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…To reduce battery consumption in IMDs, methods have been suggested that use an external device (called a cloaker) [17][18][19]. A cloaker is a device, such as a smartphone, that operates on behalf of the IMD.…”

Section: Communication Cloakingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Energy-Aware Key Exchange for Securing Implantable Medical Devices

Choi

Lee

et al. 2018

Security and Communication Networks

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Implantable medical devices (IMDs) continuously monitor the condition of a patient and directly apply treatments if considered necessary. Because IMDs are highly effective for patients who frequently visit hospitals (e.g., because of chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease), their use is increasing significantly. However, related security concerns have also come to the fore. It has been demonstrated that IMDs can be hacked-the IMD power can be turned off remotely, and abnormally large doses of drugs can be injected into the body. Thus, IMDs may ultimately threaten a patient's life. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware key exchange protocol for securing IMDs. We utilize synchronous interpulse intervals (IPIs) as the source of a secret key. These IPIs enable IMDs to agree upon a secret key with an external programmer in an authenticated and transparent manner without any key material being exposed either before distribution or during initialization. We demonstrate that it is difficult for adversaries to guess the keys established using our method. In addition, we show that the reduced communication overhead of our method enhances battery life, making the proposed approach more energy-efficient than previous methods.

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Section: Communication Cloakingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Energy-Aware Key Exchange for Securing Implantable Medical Devices

Choi

Lee

et al. 2018

Security and Communication Networks

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“…The attacker can predict the value of Hamming weight ℎ of in time for each acquired traces . Equation (2) can compute the PCC between these predictions of Hamming weight ℎ and the instantaneous power consumption of the set of acquired traces . The maximum PCC corresponds to the correct key.…”

Section: The Correlation Power Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With the development of information technology, information security plays an important role in medical system [1,2], communications [3], finance [4], and other fields. Sidechannel analysis [5,6] which focuses on exploiting the implementation or some measurable nonmathematical property of a cryptographic system, was introduced by Kocher et al in 1996.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

RFA: R-Squared Fitting Analysis Model for Power Attack

Wang

Zhang

Zhu

et al. 2017

Security and Communication Networks

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Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) introduced by Brier et al. in 2004 is an important method in the side-channel attack and it enables the attacker to use less cost to derive secret or private keys with efficiency over the last decade. In this paper, we propose -squared fitting model analysis (RFA) which is more appropriate for nonlinear correlation analysis. This model can also be applied to other side-channel methods such as second-order CPA and collision-correlation power attack. Our experiments show that the RFA-based attacks bring significant advantages in both time complexity and success rate.

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“…Hei et al showed a simple yet effective attack where adversaries force the IMD to respond to their messages, which reduces the battery life of the IMD [13]. Halperin et al analysed the proprietary protocol between the device programmer and a second generation ICD to communicate over the short-range communication channel [12].…”

Section: Software Radio-based Attacks On Imdsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the (in)security of the latest generation implantable cardiac defibrillators and how to secure them

Marin

Singelée

Garcia

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference on Computer Security Applications

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Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) typically use proprietary protocols with no or limited security to wirelessly communicate with a device programmer. These protocols enable doctors to carry out critical functions, such as changing the IMD's therapy or collecting telemetry data, without having to perform surgery on the patient. In this paper, we fully reverse-engineer the proprietary communication protocol between a device programmer and the latest generation of a widely used Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) which communicate over a long-range RF channel (from two to five meters). For this we follow a black-box reverse-engineering approach and use inexpensive Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) equipment. We demonstrate that reverse-engineering is feasible by a weak adversary who has limited resources and capabilities without physical access to the devices. Our analysis of the proprietary protocol results in the identification of several protocol and implementation weaknesses. Unlike previous studies, which found no security measures, this article discovers the first known attempt to obfuscate the data that is transmitted over the air. Furthermore, we conduct privacy and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks and give evidence of other attacks that can compromise the patient's safety. All these attacks can be performed without needing to be in close proximity to the patient. We validate that our findings apply to (at least) 10 types of ICDs that are currently on the market. Finally, we propose several practical short-and long-term countermeasures to mitigate or prevent existing vulnerabilities.

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Defending Resource Depletion Attacks on Implantable Medical Devices

Cited by 100 publications

References 14 publications

Energy-Aware Key Exchange for Securing Implantable Medical Devices

Energy-Aware Key Exchange for Securing Implantable Medical Devices

RFA: R-Squared Fitting Analysis Model for Power Attack

On the (in)security of the latest generation implantable cardiac defibrillators and how to secure them

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