This post is part of our research archive and is a selected publication. Although Armatyr was founded in 2026, members of our team have been conducting and publishing research in medical device and hospital IT security for over a decade. We maintain this archive to provide context for our experience and contributions to the field.

The authors explore how secure location-sensing systems can be applied in hospital settings to track equipment and staff while protecting against spoofing and unauthorized tracking. They introduce Beacon+, a Bluetooth Low Energy device that extends Apple’s iBeacon design with cryptographically authenticated, replay-resistant advertisements, so a beacon’s location claims can’t be forged or replayed by an attacker. The authors build a real-time asset tracking system on top of Beacon+ and use it to enforce location-based access control, for example requiring a clinician’s badge to be physically near a patient before releasing their record. Their full abstract is quoted below:

Secure location sensing has the potential to improve healthcare processes regarding security, efficiency, and safety. For example, enforcing close physical proximity to a patient when using a barcode medication administration system (BCMA) can mitigate the consequences of unsafe barcode scanning workarounds. We present Beacon+, a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) device that extends the design of Apple’s popular iBeacon specification with unspoofable, temporal, and authenticated advertisements. Our prototype Beacon+ design enables secure location sensing applications such as real-time tracking of hospital assets (e.g., infusion pumps). We implement this exact real-time tracking system and use it as a foundation for a novel application that applies location-based restrictions on access control.

Paul Martin, Michael Rushanan, Thomas Tantillo, Christoph Lehmann, and Aviel D. Rubin. “Applications of Secure Location Sensing in Healthcare.” Proceedings of ACM Conference of Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (BCB), 2016.