Theses and Dissertations Collection

Healthcare remote devices are recognized as a promising technology for treating health related issues. Among them are the wireless Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs): These electronic devices are manufactured to treat, monitor, support or replace defected vital organs while being implanted in the human body. Thus, they play a critical role in healing and even saving lives. Current IMDs research trends concentrate on their medical reliability. However, deploying wireless technology in such applications without considering security measures may offer adversaries an easy way to compromise them. Many malicious attacks on these devices can directly affect the patient's health in a lethal way. Using insecure wireless channels for these devices offers adversaries easy ways to steal the patient's private data and hijack these systems. On the other hand, IMDs suffer from limited resources, such as the energy supply, processing power, and storage space. This renders security schemes a critical feature for implementation. A certain balance between security and efficiency must be attained in each IMD for a satisfactory and safe functioning.

Therefore, we intend throughout our work to design effective security schemes to defend these IMDs. Our goal is to create or accommodate security approaches for the specific case of any IMD. We want to ensure for any IMD-user a high efficiency from the IMD to improve his health, while guaranteeing a safe use.

Our plans are to decrease the computational complexity of security algorithms and authentication protocols to fit on any IMD. We also want to explore biometric features for better and safer use. We investigate all the possible scenarios (regular or urgent) to guarantee for the patient a reliable device.