Light-weight encryption of wireless communication for implantable medical devices using henon chaotic system

Abstract

Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) are a growing industry regarding personal health care and monitoring. In addition, they provide patients with efficient treatments. In general, these devices use wireless communication technologies that may require synchronization with the medical team. Even though wireless technology offers satisfaction to the patient's daily life, it is still prone to security threats. 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. This can cause damage to patients and render their devices unusable. In the aim of protecting these devices, we explore in this paper a new way to create symmetric encryption keys to encrypt the wireless communication held by the IMDs. This key generation will rely on chaotic systems to obtain synchronized Pseudo-Random keys that will be generated separately in the system. This generation is in a way that the communication channel will avoid a wireless key exchange, protecting the patient from key theft. Moreover, we will explore the performance of this generator from a cryptographic point of view, ensuring that these keys are safe to use for communication encryption. 2017 IEEE.