Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Ultrasound Could Protect Pacemakers From Hackers

by Caleb Johnson on November 11, 2009 at 04:01 PM

You never want your wireless device open to attacks, but if that device is implanted inside your body, security becomes even more important. With pacemakers and other medical devices being controlled and monitored from afar, scientists say it's time to step up protection. Those concerns in mind, a group of researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control have developed a new safety net.

According to Technology Review, the system uses ultrasound waves to measure the distance between a medical device and the wireless reader trying to communicate with it. This could prevent potential hackers from wirelessly gaining access to private information stored on the device, draining its battery, or causing it to malfunction. With the ultrasound system, access to the device would be restricted to the physical proximity of the communicator. In the plan proposed by senior researcher Claude Castelluccia and his team, you'd need to go through a series of authentication steps and be within 10 meters of the device in order to gain access.

With technology's increasing presence in our anatomies, it's good to know that scientists are thinking about security. Knowing that the computer on our desk is susceptible to attacks is bad enough, but if a wireless device is keeping our heart beating, we want security to be tighter than Fort Knox. [From: Technology Review]

Tags: hack, health, medical, pacemaker, research, science, security, top, ultrasound, wireless

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular