MedMon: A Novel Device for Monitoring Medical Device Security

 MedMon: A Novel Device for Monitoring Medical Device Security

Princeton Docket # 12-2789-1

Rapid advances in personal healthcare systems based on implantable and wearable medical devices promise to greatly improve the quality of diagnosis and treatment for a range of medical conditions. However, the increasing programmability and wireless connectivity of medical devices also open up opportunities for malicious attackers. Unfortunately, implantable/wearable medical devices come with extreme size and power constraints, and unique usage models, making it infeasible to simply borrow conventional security solutions, e.g., encryption, from general-purpose or even other embedded computing systems.

Researchers at Princeton University and Purdue University have developed a general framework for securing medical devices based on wireless channel monitoring and anomaly detection. This technology monitors all wireless communication to and from these medical devices and uses a multilayered anomaly detection methodology to identify potentially malicious transactions.  Security analysis shows that the proposed defenses, used passively by notifying the user or actively by jamming the malicious packets, have the potential to mitigate the security risks associated with personal healthcare systems. Additionally, this technology is backward-compatible with existing medical devices and, hence, does not need any hardware or software modifications.

Publications

Chunxiao Li, Anand Raghunathan, and Niraj K. Jha, Hijacking an insulin pump: Security attacks and defenses for a diabetes therapy system. IEEE Int. Conf. on e-Health Networking Applications and Services, June 2011.

Meng Zhang, Anand Raghunathan, and Niraj K. Jha. MedMon: Securing medical devices through wireless monitoring and anomaly detection. IEEE (Submitted).

The Faculty Inventors

Niraj K. Jha is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. His research interests include computer-aided design of FinFET and 3D ICs, power/thermal analysis, optimization and management of ICs and systems, synthesis methodologies for quantum computing, security in embedded systems,     energy-efficient buildings, computer architecture, biomedical devices and digital system testing.

Anand Raghunathan is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. His research interests include system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture and design methodologies, application-specific and domain-specific VLSI processing architectures, embedded systems, low-power design, information security and trust in embedded system and SoC design, and electronic design automation.

Intellectual Property & Development status

Patent protection is pending and a working prototype has been developed.

Princeton is currently seeking commercial partners for the further development and commercialization of this opportunity.

Media Report

This pioneering technology has been covered in premier news media. It was reported by Canadian TV, Voice of America, and Fox News. It also attracted remarkable coverage in several influential medical device magazines/media: Medical Product Manufacturing News & Qmed.com, MPO & ODT Magazines, MedicalDeviceNow, Rodman Publishing Co., IEEE Institute and Digital Health Group blog.

Contact

Laurie Tzodikov
Princeton University Office of Technology Licensing 

(609) 258-7256 tzodikov@princeton.edu