Ultrasound protects artificial organs from hacking

There are many depictions that a part of the body replaced by a machine is hijacked by hacking in various cyber punk works such as Masamune Shiro's manga "Ghost in the Shell", but even in the real world such a "Kill people with hackingDanger has come to be discussed.

Indeed, some implantable medical devices are controlled by radio waves, which is not a situation in which the possibility of malfunctioning due to hacking can not be denied, whereas ultrasound has been proposed as an effective defense mechanism It seems.

Details are below.
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The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Computer Science Control Laboratory of France jointly conduct research on wireless medical devices.

Currently proposed is that when the patient is stable, access to the implanted device can be made from an external device within 10 m from the external device within 10 m, and when the condition suddenly changes, no authentication from all devices within 3 cm How to make access possible. Although it is regrettable even in the case of an emergency because access authorization time is regrettable, it is a security problem that becomes a problem at that time. If you use only radio waves, you can skip strong radio waves from afar, and access will be possible pretending to be harmless medical equipment.

For such an attack, it is necessary to measure the exact distances of the devices from the outside in an undisturbed manner, but ultrasound is effective at that time. The idea of ​​being able to avoid problems can be avoided if the equipment to be accessed from the outside is to emit ultrasonic waves in addition to radio waves and measuring it with the microphone of the embedded equipment has been issued. With this method, there is no need to upsize or complicate the equipment more than necessary, and it is possible to comply with simplicity of handling securely while filtering access by hackers.

Experimental scene with beef as a human body.


Developers are fully matured about this mechanism and will withstand practical use, but some say that careful development is necessary only for things that lead to catastrophes if one accident occurs. One of the researchersTada Yoshi · Kono"We need research not only for computer engineers but also medical professionals," he says.