Security and Privacy for Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Nuno Miguel Alves dos
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/5731
• topic: Comunicações; Icd; Mqtt; Nfc; Privacidade; Segurança; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

In a world where the number of people with health issues directly related with the heart is increasing, the need for this people to implant auxiliary systems for the normal functioning of the human body’s main organ is exponentially increasing. Amongst the range of devices belonging to the family of implantable medical devices (IMDs), implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) currently are the devices that posses the widest range of therapeutic features for the different existing cardiac anomalies. However, these systems possess some flaws at the communications security level, mainly due to the difficulty in balancing privacy and security with safety and utility. The present dissertation presents a study on security and privacy of communications between ICDs, their respective programmers and the range of health card entities involved in receiving and monitoring information from and to these devices. The current standards of hardware, communication, and security and privacy of these devices are presented and in addition, it is presented how simple it can be to intercept a radio frequency (RF) signal sent by a key fob, process which is similar to the communications done between an ICD and its programmer. As well as this study the principal focus of this thesis is to study and present some alternative proposals for the current communications architecture of ICD communications with the backoffice, where we include the implementation of two proof-of-concept android applications, using near field communication (NFC) and message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) technologies.