Secure remote reprogramming of implantable medical devices

In the last years, there has been a technological revolution that has lead to important advances in the medical industry, such as remote monitoring systems for observing the patient’s health status when they are at home. Similarly, in the near future, remote reprogramming systems will revolutionize the health care industry, allowing doctors to (re)program medical implants of a patient being at home. However, as remote reprogramming systems perform actions that could endanger the patient’s life, they must also deploy strong security mechanisms to protect against different types of (wireless) attack. Therefore, in this paper we propose a secure key management solution that can be used to bootstrap the cryptographic algorithms that are needed to create a secure channel between the doctor and the patient’s implant. Our security solution combines biometrics and cryptography and only requires limited user interaction.