The Resource Depletion Attack and Defense Scheme

Abstract

With the rapid growth of IMDs, IMD security becomes a critical issue since the attacks on the devices may directly harm the patient. IMDs typically have very limited resources in terms of energy, processing capability, and storage. In this chapter, we will introduce a new kind of attack on IMDs: the Resource Depletion (RD) attack, which is used to quickly deplete the resources of an IMD, such as battery power. The RD attacks can reduce the lifetime of an IMD from several years to a few weeks. The attacks can be easily launched but cannot be defended against by traditional cryptographic approaches. In our paper [11], we propose utilizing the patient’s IMD access pattern, and we design a novel Support Vector Machine (SVM) based scheme to address the RD attacks. Our SVM-based scheme is very effective at defending against the RD attacks. Our experimental results show that the average detection rate of the SVM-based scheme is above 90 %.