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Privacy Challenges for Wireless Medical Devices...

by Brent J Lagesse
Publication Type
Conference Paper
Publication Date
Conference Name
1st USENIX Workshop on Health Security and Privacy (HealthSec '10)
Conference Location
Washington, Virginia, United States of America
Conference Sponsor
USENIX
Conference Date

Implantable medical devices are becoming more pervasive as new technologies increase their reliability and safety. Furthermore, these devices are becoming increasingly reliant on wireless communication for interaction with the device. Such technologies have the potential to leak information that could be utilized by an attacker to threaten the lives of patients.

Privacy of patient information is essential; however, this information is not the only privacy issue that must be considered. In this paper, we discuss why information privacy is insufficient for protecting patients from some attacks and how information regarding the presence of individual devices can leak vulnerabilities. Furthermore, we examine existing privacy enhancing algorithms and discuss their applicability to implantable medical devices.