Protect Your Pacemaker: Blockchain based Authentication and Consented Authorization for Implanted Medical Devices

Abstract

Existing implanted medical devices often do not use any form of authentication due to resource constraints, resulting in unauthorized access or programming of devices. In this paper, we introduce Medical Implant Consent (MedIC), a non-embedded, blockchain-based solution that provides authentication and authorization according to patient consent. We design protocols for doctors to obtain digital medical licenses and for patients to obtain and verify digital patient consent. We evaluate the performance and cost of our solution, using time measurements and memory footprint of relevant operations. We also enumerate our cryptographic operations and compute the energy with benchmarked measurements. Our results demonstrate a memory footprint of 4436 MB and timing delay of 200 ms to authenticate according to our patient’s consent.