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Securing wireless neurostimulators

Boekbijdrage - Boekhoofdstuk Conferentiebijdrage

© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Implantable medical devices (IMDs) typically rely on proprietary protocols to wirelessly communicate with external device programmers. In this paper, we fully reverse engineer the proprietary protocol between a device programmer and a widely used commercial neurostimulator from one of the leading IMD manufacturers. For the reverse engineering, we follow a black-box approach and use inexpensive hardware equipment. We document the message format and the protocol state-machine, and show that the transmissions sent over the air are neither encrypted nor authenticated. Furthermore, we conduct several software radio-based attacks that could compromise the safety and privacy of patients, and investigate the feasibility of performing these attacks in real scenarios. Motivated by our findings, we propose a security architecture that allows for secure data exchange between the device programmer and the neurostimulator. It relies on using a patient’s physiological signal for generating a symmetric key in the neurostimulator, and transporting this key from the neurostimulator to the device programmer through a secret out-of-band (OOB) channel. Our solution allows the device programmer and the neurostimulator to agree on a symmetric session key without these devices needing to share any prior secrets; offers an effective and practical balance between security and permissive access in emergencies; requires only minor hardware changes in the devices; adds minimal computation and communication overhead; and provides forward and backward security. Finally, we implement a proof-of-concept of our solution.
Boek: ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY)
Pagina's: 287 - 298
Aantal pagina's: 12
ISBN:9781450356329
Jaar van publicatie:2018
BOF-keylabel:ja
IOF-keylabel:ja
Authors from:Higher Education
Toegankelijkheid:Closed