Title:  Medical Device Security Through Hardware Signatures

Committee: 

Dr. Mooney, Advisor

Dr. Keezer, Co- Advisor         

Dr. Saltaformaggio, Chair

Dr. Inan

Abstract:

The objective of the proposed research is to design signature-based techniques to detect run-time software and hardware malicious modifications in embedded medical devices. Specifically, the proposed hardware-based signature generation architecture helps in detecting and distinguishing extremely small hardware Trojan (HT) attacks and errors from health problems in medical devices. In addition, the proposed architecture provides a hardware-assisted technique for detecting run-time malicious code modifications on applications running on the operating system of the embedded medical device. In the preliminary work, three types of signature generation techniques, namely, analog-, digital- and physiological-based signatures were designed, simulated, and synthesized. In the future work, the architecture will be expanded such that a hardware monitor is designed and attached to the medical device's main memory system. The monitor creates page-based signatures of the code running on the system at compile-time and stores them in a secure database. It then checks for the integrity of the code pages at run-time by regenerating the page-based signatures and comparing them to the legitimate signatures. Preliminary results show that the proposed overall embedded architecture provides a successful approach to detecting malicious modifications in real-time without incurring significant area and performance overhead. Both, the developed and the proposed work will improve consumer confidence in health monitoring applications by increasing the assurance provided to the public that their health data are safely captured and processed.