Physical layer security for wireless implantable medical devices

Abstract

Wireless communications are increasingly important in health-care applications, particularly in those that use implantable medical devices (IMDs). Such systems have many advantages in providing remote healthcare in terms of monitoring, treatment and prediction for critical cases. However, the existence of malicious adversaries, referred to as nodes, which attempt to control implanted devices, constitutes a critical risk for patients. Such adversaries may perform dangerous attacks by sending malicious commands to the IMD, and any weakness in the device authentication mechanism may result in serious problems including death. In this paper we present a physical layer (PHY) authentication technique for IMDs that does not use existing methods of cryptology. In addition to ensuring authentication, the proposed technique also provides advantages in terms of decreasing processing complexity of IMDs and enhances overall communications performance.