Wear a jammer to stop your pacemaker being hacked

[ShyWriter]

Wear a jammer to stop your pacemaker being hacked

11:19 17 June 2011

Jesse Emspak, contributor

(Image: SPL)

Hacking seems to be everywhere these days. But what if someone tried to retrieve data from your pacemaker? Or even tried to give you an electric shock with it?

That may sound far-fetched. But a team of computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Massachusetts has been taking it seriously. Many implanted medical devices can be controlled by wireless networks. The point is to make it easier for a doctor to adjust them and get data about a patient's health without having to physically connect to the device. But much of the data on these devices is unencrypted.

The danger, the scientists say, is real, as the open nature of the network can be used to send commands to a device that would compromise data or, more seriously, tell it to behave differently. One could even use a pacemaker, for instance, to shock someone. To stop this without having to retrofit every such device, the team came up with a simple solution: a jammer that can be worn. The jammer prevents anything from transmitting to the medical device unless it gives the right password or code.

Ordinarily anything that receives and transmits on the same frequency would have to have antennas placed a certain distance apart, but some creative signal processing software solved that. All the encryption and security are "off loaded" to the jammer, so no modifications and no surgery are needed. And in an emergency your doctor needn't ask for your password.

Source: http://www.newscient...utorhackin.html

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