Hacking Health: Unveiling Vulnerabilities in BLE-Enabled Wearable Sensor Nodes

The rise of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in healthcare brings benefits like continuous monitoring, remote patient care, and data-driven treatments. However, it also poses cybersecurity risks. While prior research has investigated this issue, it has not looked at advanced wearable sensor nodes that use combination of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) with other wireless protocols. In this paper we conduct a blackbox audit of wearable sensor nodes for exploring vulnerabilities associated with them. We use a systematic auditing approach to (1) investigate whether security attacks are effective against wearable sensor nodes, (2) group the vulnerabilities based on susceptibility to certain types of attacks, and (3) provide an in-depth gap analysis of the devices’ security behaviour. We develop and release an approach for semi-automated wearable sensor nodes experimentation to reveal their response to common security threats. We perform hundreds of experiments using popular commercial wearable sensor nodes when deployed in an IoMT testbed. Our results indicate not only that these devices are vulnerable to common security attacks, but also their critical security gaps jeopardize patient safety and data integrity.