A Continuous Role-Based Authentication Scheme and Data Transmission Protocol for Implantable Medical Devices

Over the last decade, new technologies have been developed to give support to efficient medical treatments. Implantable Medical Device (IMD) is one such supporting device whose usage has been increasing remarkably in extending and improving the quality of a patient's life. With the remotely monitored IMDs being prevalent today, all of the patient's data is readily available on these devices and is accessible over the internet. But, unauthorized access to IMDs could endanger the patient's life. To prevent such dangers, this paper proposes a continuous role-based authentication technique for user and IMD monitoring computer interaction. Also, while the numerous benefits of wireless connectivity are well understood, the recent research has shown that such connectivity can be exploited to compromise the security of IMDs and bring serious risk to the patient's life when an adversary tampers with the data that is being transferred over the channel. For this purpose, this paper proposes a definite protocol for secure data transmission during Computer-IMD interaction, by taking into account the constrained resources of an IMD, in particular, the memory and powered battery.