WattsUpDoc: power side channels to nonintrusively discover untargeted malware on embedded medical devices
Shane S. Clark, Benjamin Ransford, Amir Rahmati, Shane Guineau, Jacob M. Sorber, Kevin Fu, Wenyuan Xu · 2013
Medical devices based on embedded systems are ubiq-uitous in clinical settings. Increasingly, they connect to networks and run off-the-shelf operating systems vulnerable to malware. But strict validation require-ments make it prohibitively difficult or costly to use anti-virus software or automated operating system up-dates on these systems. Our add-on monitoring system, WattsUpDoc, uses a traditionally undesirable side chan-nel of power consumption to enable run-time malware detection. In our experiments, WattsUpDoc detected pre-viously known malware with at least 94 % accuracy and previously unknown malware with at least 85 % accu-racy on several embedded devices—detection rates sim-ilar to those of conventional malware-detection systems on PCs. WattsUpDoc detects malware without requiring hardware or software modifications or network commu-nication. 1