Deep dip teardown of tubeless insulin pump

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive teardown and security analysis of the OmniPod tubeless insulin pump, revealing vulnerabilities and offering insights to improve hardware security in medical devices.

Contribution

It presents a detailed methodology for dissecting and analyzing a medical device, highlighting security weaknesses and suggesting improvements.

Findings

Identification of security weaknesses in the device

Demonstration of firmware extraction and analysis

Insights into hardware vulnerabilities

Abstract

This paper introduces a deep level teardown process of a personal medical device - the OmniPod wireless tubeless insulin pump. This starts with mechanical teardown exposing the engineering solutions used inside the device. Then the electronic part of the device is analysed followed by components identification. Finally, the firmware extraction is performed allowing further analysis of the firmware inside the device as well as real-time debugging. This paper also evaluates the security of the main controller IC of the device. It reveals some weaknesses in the device design process which lead to the possibility of the successful teardown. Should the hardware security of the controller inside the device was well thought through, the teardown process would be far more complicated. This paper demonstrates what the typical teardown process of a personal medical device involves. This knowledge could help in improving the hardware security of sensitive devices.