IMD Security vs. Energy: Are We Tilting at Windmills?: POSTER
This addresses the critical problem of balancing security and battery life for life-critical IMDs, representing an incremental improvement over existing lightweight solutions.
The paper tackles the trade-off between security and energy in Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) by showing that recent advances in embedded computing allow the use of more mainstream security primitives without significantly compromising IMD autonomy.
Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) such as pacemakers and neurostimulators are highly constrained in terms of energy. In addition, the wireless-communication facilities of these devices also impose security requirements considering their life-critical nature. However, security solutions that provide considerable coverage are generally considered to be too taxing on an IMD battery. Consequently, there has been a tendency to adopt ultra-lightweight security primitives for IMDs in literature. In this work, we demonstrate that the recent advances in embedded computing in fact enable the IMDs to use more mainstream security primitives, which do not need to compromise significantly on security for fear of impacting IMD autonomy.