Research Initiation Award: Designing Efficient Access Control Schemes for Implantable Medical Devices

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Research Initiation Awards provide support for junior and mid-career faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities who are building new research programs or redirecting and rebuilding existing research programs. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness, improves research and teaching at the home institution, and involves undergraduate students in research experiences. The award to Fayetteville State University has potential broader impacts in a number of areas. The goal of this project is to study access control schemes for implantable medical devices; as well as to enhance teaching and learning at the university by developing courses and involving undergraduate students in this research. This research project designs and implements novel lightweight and generalized access control schemes that can effectively secure implantable medical devices (IMDs) from unauthorized access in both regular and emergency situations. The smartphone is used as a proxy to delegate the complex cryptographic computations for access control. Additionally, to prolong the lifetime of the resource-constrained IMDs, a modified compressive sensing technique will be used to reduce both the communication overheads and the computational overheads for data encryption between the IMD and the proxy. The ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) will be employed to provide fine-grained access control over the qualifications of IMD programmer operator, usually the physician. The proposed access control schemes are fully automated and no patient participation is required. Currently, there are no common security standards or specifications available for IMD products to follow. The results of this project will prompt and guide the IMD industry to develop standards and specifications on the cybersecurity issues for commercial IMD products. This project will be conducted in collaboration with Temple University.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.