The THaW team is pleased to announce the first of its three papers to be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (aka ‘Oakland’) in May.

SoK: Security and Privacy in Implantable Medical Devices and Body Area Networks
Michael Rushanan, Aviel D. Rubin, Denis Foo Kune, Colleen M. Swanson

Abstract: Balancing security, privacy, safety, and utility is a necessity in the health care domain, in which implantable medical devices (IMDs) and body area networks (BANs) have made it possible to continuously and automatically manage and treat a number of health conditions, ranging from cardiac arrhythmia to Parkinson’s disease. In this work, we provide a clear definition and overview of the problem space, categorizing relevant research results in academia with respect to threats and identifying trends and directions for future research. We identify three broad research categories aimed at ensuring the security and privacy of the telemetry interface, software, and physiological sensing interface layers. We find that while the security of the telemetry interface has received much attention in academia, both the threat of software exploitation and the sensor interface layer deserve further attention.

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