A Novel Authentication Biometric for Pacemakers

Pacemakers are devices used to regulate heart rate in individuals with abnormal heart rhythms. They are often paired with a programmer, which can receive data from and send commands to them. The goal of this work is to explore a new biometric-based authentication layer to pacemaker-programmer communication. In this paper we present our work on exploring the fusion of pacemaker electrogram and externally-measured cardiac rhythm (electrocardiogram, plethysmogram) as biometrics for authenticating a programmer to a pacemaker. In this preliminary work we use Right Ventricular Electrogram (RV EGM) signal from the pacemaker and Atrial Electrogram (Atrial EGM) as a proxy for the externally measured cardiac rhythm (particularly ECG) to show the feasibility of our approach, achieving an accuracy rate of ~92%.

[1]  Zhiwei Wang,et al.  A privacy-preserving and accountable authentication protocol for IoT end-devices with weaker identity , 2017, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[2]  Kevin Fu,et al.  Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: Software Radio Attacks and Zero-Power Defenses , 2008, 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (sp 2008).

[3]  Alan Borning,et al.  Patients, pacemakers, and implantable defibrillators: human values and security for wireless implantable medical devices , 2010, CHI.

[4]  Krishna K. Venkatasubramanian,et al.  Detecting Signal Injection Attack-Based Morphological Alterations of ECG Measurements , 2016, 2016 International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS).

[5]  Sandeep K. S. Gupta,et al.  Physiological value-based efficient usable security solutions for body sensor networks , 2010, TOSN.

[6]  Weisong Shi,et al.  On security challenges and open issues in Internet of Things , 2018, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[7]  Carmen C. Y. Poon,et al.  Using the Timing Information of Heartbeats as an Entity Identifier to Secure Body Sensor Network , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.

[8]  Xiaojiang Du,et al.  Biometric-based two-level secure access control for Implantable Medical Devices during emergencies , 2011, 2011 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[9]  Kevin Fu,et al.  They can hear your heartbeats: non-invasive security for implantable medical devices , 2011, SIGCOMM.

[10]  Yuan-Ting Zhang,et al.  Physiological Signal Based Entity Authentication for Body Area Sensor Networks and Mobile Healthcare Systems , 2005, 2005 IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology 27th Annual Conference.

[11]  Daniel R. Frisch,et al.  Trends in permanent pacemaker implantation in the United States from 1993 to 2009: increasing complexity of patients and procedures. , 2012, Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

[12]  Ayan Banerjee,et al.  PSKA: Usable and Secure Key Agreement Scheme for Body Area Networks , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.

[13]  D DiFrancesco,et al.  Pacemaker mechanisms in cardiac tissue. , 1993, Annual review of physiology.

[14]  Sandeep K. S. Gupta,et al.  Biosec: a biometric based approach for securing communication in wireless networks of biosensors implanted in the human body , 2003, 2003 International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops, 2003. Proceedings..