Biometrics

As wireless technologies become more pervasive, it becomes increasingly important for devices to authenticate the locations of other devices. For example, patients with implantable medical devices (IMDs) may reasonably expect that any device used to control their IMD would have to be within arm's reach, to help prevent unauthorized access to their device. In other words, IMDs should enforce policies based on the proximity, and in general the location, of wirelessly connected devices.

In September of 2015, it was reported that hackers had stolen the fingerprint records of 5.6 million U.S. federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This was a severe security breach, and it is an even bigger problem because those fingerprints are now permanently compromised and the users cannot generate new fingerprints. This breach demonstrates two challenging facts about the current cybersecurity landscape. First, biometric credentials are vulnerable to compromise. And, second, biometrics that cannot be replaced if stolen are even more vulnerable to theft.

Increasingly medical devices are dependent on software and the wireless channel for their operations, which also pose new vulnerabilities to their safe, dependable, and trustworthy operations. Medical devices such as implantable insulin pumps, which are in wide use today, continuously monitor and manage a patient's diabetes without the need for frequent daily patient interventions. These devices, not originally designed against cyber security threats, must now mitigate these threats.

In order to establish a secure communication channel, each communicating party needs some method to authenticate the other, lest it unwittingly establish a channel with the adversary instead. Current techniques for authentication often rely on passwords and/or the public-key infrastructure (PKI). Both of these methods have considerable drawbacks since passwords are frequently breached, and PKI relies on central authorities which have proven to be less than reliable. Thus there is a need to use other sources of information for the communicating parties to authenticate each other.

Common smartphone authentication mechanisms such as PINs, graphical passwords, and fingerprint scans offer limited security. They are relatively easy to guess or spoof, and are ineffective when the smartphone is captured after the user has logged in. Multi-modal active authentication addresses these challenges by frequently and unobtrusively authenticating the user via behavioral biometric signals, such as touchscreen interaction, hand movements, gait, voice, and phone location.