Towards Requirements for Self-Healing as a Means of Mitigating Cyber-Intrusions in Medical Devices

In recent years, “security by design” has become a fundamental requirement for new technologies, especially for those that interconnect various systems and their components, e.g., implanted medical devices with remote configurability capabilities. As such, security of implanted medical devices has become a concern exacerbated by the tight constraints characterizing them and the need to ensure patients’ safety as these devices typically work to assure life-critical functions. To protect such systems, multiple proposals have been made to detect threats and mitigate vulnerabilities and malware intrusions. A common approach is utilizing hardware redundancy to deal with system faults, however, implanted medical devices work under tight power and area constraints that may not always allow for redundancy.In this paper, we build on an existing multi-modal based mitigation scheme for securing medical devices and propose self-healing capabilities that would allow the device to automatically reestablish functionalities compromised due to external threats.