Implantable medical IoT devices are used for monitoring, diagnosis, and therapy of an ever-increasing range of medical conditions, leading to improved quality of life and outcomes for patients. Advances in the use of implantable medical IoT devices have been accompanied, and in great part enabled, by increases in their functional complexity, wireless connectivity to allow for post-deployment monitoring, and programmability to allow therapy to be tuned to the evolving needs of each patient. These factors have also led to a rapid growth in concerns about security and reliability of implantable medical IoT devices, as underscored by recent trends in warnings and recalls of these devices due to failures, and a series of successful attacks on them demonstrated by academic researchers and the hacker community. The unique usage models of implantable medical IoT devices, and the need to provide very high levels of security and reliability under very stringent resource constraints, set them apart from other classes of computing platforms.

In this presentation,Dr. Kim will present the security and reliability challenges faced by designers of implantable medical IoT devices, and two techniques for improving the security and reliability are introduced. First, a zero-power contactless signal probing technique is introduced. Long-term signal monitoring for continuous physiological data collection and device status monitoring for improved reliability is enabled by inductively coupled circuits with no active power consumption. Second, a vibration-based physically secure communication technique is presented. Mechanical vibration has a short transmission range and is highly perceptible, and thus it is suitable as an auxiliary channel for exchanging a cryptographic key to establish a secure wireless channel.

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