Mitigating Implanted Medical Device Cybersecurity Risks

Abstract

Cybersecurity vulnerabilities in medical devices have been widely documented. These issues have been described in hacking conferences as well as bulletins from the United States Food and Drug Administration. These issues present a serious threat to implantable medical devices. While the literature is replete with discussions of these vulnerabilities, there is less literature on a broad-based solution that would be applicable to all such devices. In fact, there is a substantial gap in the literature regarding how to mitigate the threat to implanted medical devices. This paper describes a specific firmware solution which can apply to any implantable medical device in order to mitigate security concerns.