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 systematize a decade of research on the security and privacy of implantable medical devices and body area networks, mapping the field’s threat models, proposed defenses, and open problems. Their full abstract is quoted below:

Balancing security, privacy, safety, and utility is a necessity in the health care domain, in which implantable medical devices (IMDs) and body area networks (BANs) have made it possible to continuously and automatically manage and treat a number of health conditions. In this work, we survey publications aimed at improving security and privacy in IMDs and health-related BANs, providing clear definitions and a comprehensive overview of the problem space. We analyze common themes, categorize relevant results, and identify trends and directions for future research. We present a visual illustration of this analysis that shows the progression of IMD/BAN research and highlights emerging threats. We identify three broad research categories aimed at ensuring the security and privacy of the telemetry interface, software, and sensor interface layers and discuss challenges researchers face with respect to ensuring reproducibility of results. We find that while the security of the telemetry interface has received much attention in academia, the threat of software exploitation and the sensor interface layer deserve further attention. In addition, we observe that while the use of physiological values as a source of entropy for cryptographic keys holds some promise, a more rigorous assessment of the security and practicality of these schemes is required.

Michael Rushanan, Denis Foo Kune, Colleen Swanson, and Aviel D. Rubin. “SoK: Security and Privacy in Implantable Medical Devices and Body Area Networks.” Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), 2014.