They Can Hear Your Heartbeats: Non-Invasive Security for Implantable Medical Devices
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Katabi_They can hear.pdf
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Author(s)
Gollakota, Shyamnath
Hassanieh, Haitham
Ransford, Benjamin
Katabi, Dina
Fu, Kevin
Date Issued
August 2011
Journal
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2011 Conference (SIGCOMM '11)
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation
Shyamnath Gollakota, Haitham Hassanieh, Benjamin Ransford, Dina Katabi, and Kevin Fu. 2011. They can hear your heartbeats: non-invasive security for implantable medical devices. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2011 conference (SIGCOMM '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2-13.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Wireless communication has become an intrinsic part of modern implantable medical devices (IMDs). Recent work, however, has demonstrated that wireless connectivity can be exploited to compromise the confidentiality of IMDs' transmitted data or to send unauthorized commands to IMDs---even commands that cause the device to deliver an electric shock to the patient. The key challenge in addressing these attacks stems from the difficulty of modifying or replacing already-implanted IMDs. Thus, in this paper, we explore the feasibility of protecting an implantable device from such attacks without modifying the device itself. We present a physical-layer solution that delegates the security of an IMD to a personal base station called the shield. The shield uses a novel radio design that can act as a jammer-cum-receiver. This design allows it to jam the IMD's messages, preventing others from decoding them while being able to decode them itself. It also allows the shield to jam unauthorized commands---even those that try to alter the shield's own transmissions. We implement our design in a software radio and evaluate it with commercial IMDs. We find that it effectively provides confidentiality for private data and protects the IMD from unauthorized commands.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/2018436.2018438
