Strong random number generation from body physiological signals for secure communication between implants inside the body and the gateway outside the body

Smart Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) have many benefits for both patients and care providers, with real-time monitoring, tuning the IMD based on the patient's need, updating the IMD firmware for better functionality and contributing real-time data for medical research. Considering the aging population, increases in chronic disease and technological breakthroughs, the electronic medical device market has reached an estimated $398 billion in 2017 with the market expanding at an expected rate of 3% per year until at least 2022 based on a report in 2017 from Harvard Business Review. At the same time the security of IMDs, becomes a great concern by many reports have been surfaced regarding the vulnerabilities of IMDs. Recently, in 2016, it has been shown how an attack to a brain's IMD could take control of the implant and do some alteration on the victim's emotion. In another example in 2016, Reuters reported vulnerabilities in insulin pumps created by Johnson & Johnson, where the attacker is able to intercept the commutation and/or request for a wrong dosage of insulin. As the result, more than 100,000 patients were advised to stop using remote control functionality of the device. In 2017, MedSec reported that more than half a million people in US were in danger because of the vulnerabilities found in St. Jude pacemakers. Based on the report published by WhiteScope in May 2017 reviewing four brands of IMDs, they have found almost 8,000 vulnerabilities in these devices mostly caused because of no or static encryption keys used between IMD and its gateway. To solve this problem, we have developed a new protocol which can provide secure communication between IMD and the gateway using temporary keys. The solution has been examined on a very large pool of data and proved to be as secure as AES algorithm. This methodology not only solves the problem of static keys in IMDs, it provides the opportunity to pair more than one device to an IMD or among IMDs.