Patent 8102999 was granted and assigned to Medtronic on January, 2012 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A communications protocol is used to provide data privacy, message integrity, message freshness, and user authentication to telemetric traffic, especially to and from implantable medical devices in a body area network. Encryption, message integrity, and message freshness are provided through use of token-like nonces and ephemeral session-keys derived from device identification numbers and pseudorandom numbers.