Prevent implant attacks

US experts have built a kind of ' shield ' that prevents hackers from attacking wirelessly connected implants.

Millions of people around the world are now dependent on medical implants such as defibrillators, pacemakers, and pumps . Each year more than 300,000 people are equipped with such devices. Most of these artificial devices operate through wireless connections. This allows the doctor or patient caregiver to closely monitor important patient indicators, give medication and adjust treatment if necessary.

Most of these artificial devices operate via wireless connectivity (Photo: LiveScicence).

However, like most other popular wireless devices, they are also likely to be attacked by hackers.Tech News Daily quoted the Associate Professor Dina Katabi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) as saying the attacker could order the transplant department to provide a lethal amount of medicine or voltage .

Although such attacks have not happened yet, it is a risk that cannot be ruled out, and this prompted experts Katabi and colleagues to act. And they created a system that could prevent similar attacks.

The system uses a second transmitter that researchers call a " shield " to encrypt and authenticate wireless communications so that unauthorized messages cannot reach the implant. The shield is controlled by the patient in charge of the patient. According to Ms. Katabi, this device serves as a safe communication port between doctors and patients. ' Want to communicate with the internal implant must send authenticated and encrypted messages to the shield. After that, the shield transmitted the message to the implant, while preventing unauthenticated messages from reaching the device , 'explained the American associate professor.

In other words, only those with the ' key ' of the shield can access information on a pacemaker, pacemaker or other medical implants . Researchers have decided to design a shield as an external device for a number of reasons. Accordingly, they do not want implant devices to become overloaded. In addition, encryption on a medical device can have fatal consequences in an emergency. But this shield is small enough to be worn as a head collar or brooch so it can be easily removed.