A New Externally Worn Proxy-Based Protector for Non-Secure Wireless Implantable Medical Devices: Security Jacket

Abstract

Wireless transmission systems of implantable medical devices (IMDs) should be secure against eavesdroppers and adversaries because of patient rights and health. This paper focuses on full-duplex secure communication of wireless IMD systems, proposing a new protector that is compatible with existing unsecure systems. This new protector is an externally worn jacket and therefore called a security jacket. Because some advanced sensors are placed on the jacket to provide physical layer security. Randomly multi-jamming with a great number of sensors is applied when IMD transmission occurs with the jamming extraction and maximum ratio combining (MRC) reception simultaneously. When reception by IMD is performed, a randomized spoofing-based transmit beamforming technique is applied. This protector also supports higher power efficiency and longer battery life.

Keywords

• Transmit beamforming
• physical layer security for IMDs
• spoofing-based transmit beamforming
• wireless implantable medical devices
• wireless wearable sensors