Many implants like this pacemaker can receive
and transmit wireless signals

What’s the News: Topping the list of things you don’t want hacked is your heart. And with 300,000 medical devices such as pacemakers and drug pumps implanted each year, many of which can be controlled through wireless signals, that might soon be a real risk for patients to consider. 

To prevent such attacks, researchers from MIT and UMass Amherst are developing a jamming device that can be worn as a necklace or watch and keeps implants from receiving orders from unauthorized senders. The team will present their experiments with defibrillators [pdf], with off-the-shelf radio transmitters playing the role of the shield, at the SIGCOMM conference in Toronto.

How the Heck:

Many medical implants send data about how a patient is doing directly to the doctor via radio transmission. And doctors can tweak implants’ performance by sending instructions like “Release more of that drug” or “Beat faster.”
The team’s device, called a shield, would intercept such instructions and, if they were encrypted using the key available only to the patient’s doctor, send them along to the implant, while unauthorized messages—which might go something like ”Provide a lethal shock to the heart”— wouldn’t be passed on. The implant’s own messages would in turn be encrypted and sent onto the doctor. The team found ...