A non-key based security scheme supporting emergency treatment of wireless implants

The security of wireless communication module for Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) poses a unique challenge that doctors in any qualified hospital should have the access to the IMDs for an emergency treatment while the IMD should be protected from adversaries during a patient's daily life. In this paper, we present a non-key based security scheme for the emergency treatment of IMDs, named the BodyDouble. This scheme employs an external authentication proxy embedded in a gateway to authenticate the identity of a programmer. The gateway here employs a transmitting antenna to send data and jamming signals. When an adversary launches attacks, the gateway jams the request signal to the IMD and authenticates its identity. The gateway will also pretend to be the wireless module of the IMD by establishing a communication link with the adversary so that the adversary is spoofed to communicate with the gateway instead of the IMD. For the emergency situation, the IMD can be accessed without using any cryptographic keys by simply powering off or removing the gateway. Simulation results show that this security scheme can protect the IMD from the adversary's attacks successfully, and resist the potential repeated attacks to prevent the battery depletion of the IMD.