Researchers from Purdue and Princeton universities have developed a solution to what could be catastrophic problem for millions of people who use insulin pumps, pacemakers, and other personal medical devices that rely on wireless communication to function: MedMon — a signal-jamming personal firewall for medical devices that detects potentially malicious communications going into, or coming from, a wearable or implanted device.
After identifying malicious signals, MedMon employs electronic jamming, similar to technology used in military systems, to prevent any potentially harmful wireless commands from getting through to the device and causing it to falter or accept instructions that could cause its wearer harm.
The research team highlighted the need for its prototype by replicating, in the lab, an attack on a diabetes monitoring system, which consists of a continuous glucose monitor and an insulin pump that communicate wirelessly with each other. Analyzing a commercially available glucose monitor, the scientists were able to eavesdrop on the wireless communication sent to the device — they used off-the-shelf software and hardware — and to reverse-engineer the communication protocol, discover the device PIN, and send their own malicious data to it, including instructions to start and stop insulin injection.
Source: http://www.securitynewsdaily.com/1753-firewall-prevent-pacemaker-hacking.html
