Securing wireless communication with implanted medical devices using reciprocal carrier-phase quantization

Securing wireless communication with resource-constrained implanted medical devices is considered. A method for refreshing symmetric encryption keys by reciprocal quantization of the phase between local oscillators is proposed and analyzed. The method relies on simple low cost implementation and demands virtually no computation power or memory. These properties make the proposed method an attractive alternative to traditional symmetric key establishment algorithms that typically require resources unavailable to implanted devices. It is shown that the proposed method coupled with symmetric encryption results in a resource-efficient solution for securing wireless communication with implanted devices.