A Visible Light Channel Based Access Control Scheme for Wireless Insulin Pump Systems

Abstract

Smart personal insulin pumps have been widely adopted by type 1 diabetes. However, many wireless insulin pump systems lack security mechanisms to protect them from malicious attacks. In previous works, the read-write attacks over RF channels can be launched stealthily and could jeopardize patients' lives. Protecting patients from such attacks is urgent. To address this issue, we propose a novel visible light channel based access control scheme for wireless infusion insulin pumps. This scheme employs an infrared photodiode sensor as a receiver in an insulin pump, and an infrared LED as an emitter in a doctor's reader (USB) to transmit a PIN/shared key to authenticate the doctor's USB. The evaluation results demonstrate that our scheme can reliably pass the authentication process with a low false accept rate (0.05% at a distance of 5cm).