Using radio at all is probably always going to be a terrible design choice for any medical device that relies on a non-rechargeable internal battery. Last year'

Using radio at all is probably always going to be a terrible design choice for any medical device that relies on a non-rechargeable internal battery. Last year's pacemaker security alerts included the usual braindead protocols and broken authentication, but the really interesting vulnerability was about power usage. The pacemaker didn't rate-limit it's "RF wake-up" actions; anybody with a radio could spam those commands just to get the pacemaker to turn on it's transmitter to quickly ("hours") drain the entire internal battery. The older designs that used magnetic coupling to communicated required holding a bulky device right next to where the pacemaker was implanted may have been annoying to use, but that kind of roadblock is a feature for pacemakers and other devices where changing the battery requires major surgery. Also, for anybody that missed it: Karen Sandler gave a very good followup talk[2] earlier this year where she discusses her attempts to get the source code for her own pacemaker. [1] https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/advisories/ICSMA-17-241-01 https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/advisories/ICSMA-17-241-01 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wPAHu_zYDw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wPAHu_zYDw