Rice team improves safety of implanted medical devices

According to the university, the technology would use the patient’s own heartbeat as a kind of password that could only be accessed through touch.

Rice electrical and computer engineer Farinaz Koushanfar and graduate student Masoud Rostami will present Heart-to-Heart, an authentication system for IMDs, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Berlin in November. They developed the technology with Ari Juels, former chief scientist at RSA Laboratories, a security company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

IMDs generally lack the kind of password security found on a home Wi-Fi router because emergency medical technicians often need quick access to the information the devices store to save a life, Rostami said in a statement. This, however, leaves the IMDs open to attack.

‘If you have a device inside your body, a person could walk by, push a button and violate your privacy, even give you a shock,’ he said. ‘He could make [an insulin pump] inject insulin or update the software of your pacemaker. But our proposed solution forces anybody who wants to read the device to touch you.’