Can “Internet-of-Body” Thwart Cyber Attacks on Implanted Medical Devices?

Signals that are unencrypted, as was the case with Medtronic’s devices, make intentional interception easy, says Shreyas Sen, an electrical and computer engineer at Purdue University. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the same year notified the public of vulnerabilities in St. Jude Medical’s implantable cardiac devices, including pacemakers, defibrillators and resynchronization devices. To thwart would-be attackers, Sen and his colleagues have designed a countermeasure: a device worn around the wrist that uses a particular low-frequency range to confine within the human body all of the communication signals coming from a medical device.

Source: spectrum.ieee.org