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

Alhussan, M; Boem, F; Ghoreishizadeh, SS; Mandalari, AM; (2025) Hacking Health: Unveiling Vulnerabilities in BLE-Enabled Wearable Sensor Nodes. In: Proceedings IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems. IEEE Green open access

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Abstract

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.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Hacking Health: Unveiling Vulnerabilities in BLE-Enabled Wearable Sensor Nodes
Event: 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS)
Dates: 25 May 2025 - 28 May 2025
ISBN-13: 979-8-3503-5683-0
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1109/ISCAS56072.2025.11043235
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1109/iscas56072.2025.11043235
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: BLE, IoMT, wearable sensor node, security
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Electronic and Electrical Eng
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10212293
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