Deep dip teardown of tubeless insulin pump

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. Keywords—teardown; hardware security; reverse engineering; wireless tubeless insulin pump; code extraction; image processing