Wearable Proxy Device-Assisted Authentication Request Filtering for Implantable Medical Devices

Abstract

As the deepening of 5G’s support for the e-health industry, more and more wireless medical devices will suffer from various attacks and threats. Especially, the security of implantable medical devices (IMDs) which have limited computational capabilities and stringent power constraints becomes a critical issue. According to the channel state information, we exploit the special characteristics of the received signal strength (RSS) ratio between wearable proxy devices (WPDs) and IMDs in wireless body area networks (WBANs) to distinguish legitimate users and attackers. Moreover, based on the idea of proposed authentication request filtering (ARF), we design two corresponding light-weight security protocols to defend the forced authentication (FA) attacks and enhance the accessibility of IMD in emergency mode respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed ARF scheme to defend FA attacks achieves a high authentication response rate (ARR) with 99.2% for legitimate users and a low ARR with 2.4% for attackers at the maximum gap threshold point. Furthermore, when applied in emergency mode, the ARF scheme allows up to 96.3% emergency rescue devices to access the IMDs with only one attempt.