Heart device hack a shocker

by Robert McMillan

March 13, 2008 —

It didn't take much to hack into the heart monitoring device and get it to administer
a 137-volt shock: an oscilloscope, a PC, a wireless radio with a couple of antennas
and some free software.

With those tools, a group of university researchers were able to gain access
to what is known as an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), reading
sensitive patient information, disrupting its operation and even programming
it to repeatedly administer strong electric shocks.

These tiny life-saving ICD devices are surgically implanted in the chests of
heart patients, wired to the heart so they can shock it out of ventrical fibrillation.
This is a heart-attack condition in which the heart muscle twitches randomly
instead of pumping blood in a coordinated fashion.

They've been used in the U.S. since 2003, but until now have never been subject
to a rigorous public security review, according to Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant
professor with the University of Washington, who co-authored
a paper looking into the security of ICDs and pacemakers.

"We conducted some experiments that show that although there is a very
remote risk of someone tampering [with] or accessing someone's implantable device,
there is a risk," he said.

Part of the problem is that some pacemakers and ICD devices, including the
Medtronic
Maximo studied by the researchers, are designed to be remotely controlled
over an unencrypted wireless protocol. That means that, given a "fair bit
of time" to figure out the wireless protocol, a technically savvy hacker
can start reading data and controlling the defibrillator.

The kind of shock that these devices can deliver at their most powerful settings
can be intense, feeling like a kick to the chest.

The research shows that medical regulators now need to think about new issues
as computerized and networked equipment is being implanted into humans, said
Gadi Evron, a networking security expert based in Israel. "What I would
like to see are security standards being put into place alongside with the regulations,"
he said.

Device manufacturers need to think more about security, said Evron, who discussed
the idea of viruses
in human implants at the Chaos Computer Camp hacking conference last year.

Although the results of Wednesday's study may seem scary at first glance, Kohno
says the odds of someone actually carrying out this attack are low, because
the hacker would have to somehow get all of this equipment within 4 inches (10
centimeters) of a target ICD.

And while Kohno is by no means advising heart patients to stay away from these
life-saving devices, he believes that the research should help the medical industry
take security more seriously as it develops the next generation of these products,
some of which may have a much greater wireless range. "Future devices need
to incorporate a strong security mechanism," he said.

Kohno has already seen first-hand what happens when insecure technology becomes
widely adopted. He was one of the authors of an
influential 2003 paper on the security of electronic voting machines that
helped push many states to re-evaluate their use of these devices.

"One of the lessons… we learned from electronic voting, [is] it's
important to understand the risks of new technologies before they're widely
deployed," Kohno said. "I really wish that someone had done a similar
type of public analysis five or 10 years before we did the analysis that we
did."

Published on Wednesday, the paper was written by researchers at the University
of Washington, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Harvard Medical
School. They will publicly present their findings in May at a security
symposium in Oakland, California.

IDG News Service