Protect Your Pacemaker: Blockchain based Authentication and Consented Authorization for Implanted Medical Devices

Allison Gibson, Geethapriya Thamilarasu

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Existing implanted medical devices often do not use any form of authentication due to resource constraints, resulting in unauthorized access or programming of devices. In this paper, we introduce Medical Implant Consent (MedIC), a non-embedded, blockchain-based solution that provides authentication and authorization according to patient consent. We design protocols for doctors to obtain digital medical licenses and for patients to obtain and verify digital patient consent. We evaluate the performance and cost of our solution, using time measurements and memory footprint of relevant operations. We also enumerate our cryptographic operations and compute the energy with benchmarked measurements. Our results demonstrate a memory footprint of 4436 MB and timing delay of 200 ms to authenticate according to our patient's consent.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)847-856
Number of pages10
JournalProcedia Computer Science
Volume171
DOIs
StatePublished - 2020
Event3rd International Conference on Computing and Network Communications, CoCoNet 2019 - Trivandrum, Kerala, India
Duration: Dec 18 2019Dec 21 2019

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Keywords

  • authentication
  • blockchain
  • implantable medical devices
  • medical device security

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Computer Science

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Protect Your Pacemaker: Blockchain based Authentication and Consented Authorization for Implanted Medical Devices'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this