IMD Security vs. Energy: Are we tilting at windmills?: POSTER∗ Muhammad Ali Siddiqi Department of Neuroscience, Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam, The Netherlands m.siddiqi@erasmusmc.nl Christos Strydis Department of Neuroscience, Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam, The Netherlands c.strydis@erasmusmc.nl ABSTRACT Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) such as pacemakers and neu- rostimulators are highly constrained in terms of energy. In addition, the wireless-communication facilities of these devices also impose security requirements considering their life-critical nature. How- ever, security solutions that provide considerable coverage are gen- erally considered to be too taxing on an IMD battery. Consequently, there has been a tendency to adopt ultra-lightweight security prim- itives for IMDs in literature. In this work, we demonstrate that the recent advances in embedded computing in fact enable the IMDs to use more mainstream security primitives, which do not need to compromise significantly on security for fear of impacting IMD autonomy. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy →Embedded systems security; Hard- ware security implementation; Denial-of-service attacks. KEYWORDS Implantable medical device, IMD security, lightweight cryptogra- phy, denial-of-service attack, battery DoS ACM Reference Format: Muhammad Ali Siddiqi and Christos Strydis. 2019. IMD Security vs. Energy: Are we tilting at windmills?: POSTER. In Proceedings of the 16th conference on Computing Frontiers (CF ’19), April 30-May 2, 2019, Alghero, Italy. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3310273.3323421 1 INTRODUCTION Many battery-powered implantable medical devices (IMDs) are designed to operate for around ten years while implanted in the body. In order to prolong battery life, traditionally there has been a tendency to opt for less demanding and simple medical-application implementations and underlying hardware. This is especially im- portant given the safety-critical nature of these devices and their extreme reliability and availability demands. Unfortunately, until very recently, the above tendency resulted in less focus on the security aspects of IMDs given the notorious nature of the secu- rity solutions in terms of additional energy costs. Security, as a requirement, has been systematically ignored – or at the very least, ∗This work has been supported by the EU-funded project SDK4ED (Grant Agreement No. 780572). Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). CF ’19, April 30-May 2, 2019, Alghero, Italy © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6685-4/19/05. https://doi.org/10.1145/3310273.3323421 postponed – despite the fact that IMDs have been increasingly getting equipped with wireless connectivity to the outside world. Over the last decade or so, numerous vulnerabilities have been found in IMDs due to their lack of security [2, 6]. Consequently, there has been a significant ramp up in the number of solutions proposed in literature to strengthen IMD security. However, due to the stringent energy constraints of IMDs, most of the focus has been on developing lightweight security solutions [6, 10]. This en- ergy efficiency, however, comes at the cost of not adopting more mainstream and well-scrutinized solutions. One significant down- side of this trend is that the proposed solutions do not provide the fundamental security services, which one would expect to be provided in life-critical systems such as IMDs. What is more, adopt- ing well-established solutions would benefit re-certification of now more secure implants through wide-spread security techniques. From the CIAN