6 ms·

Hackers Can Kill Diabetics w/ Insulin Pumps? Facts vs. Fear Mongering

163 points by phsr 15y ago

d0ne 15y ago
The gentlemen who wrote this post takes an approach I'm not comfortable supporting: The signal and commands haven't been successfully reversed engineered yet so this isn't a real threat. A little bit about my background: 10+ years successfully (legally) reverse engineering software technology that required both client software and packet manipulation in industries that have been very proactive against it. Seeing as the medical devices are hardware items issued to unique individual recipients the issue could easily be fixed with a 1024+ Public Private Key-Pair between the devices unique to each issuance. However, this does nothing to protect the many millions of individuals, using today's devices, potentially exposed to the threat described by Jay Radcliffe.
- bullsbarry 15y ago
  It's a little less severe than that. First the device has to support remote management, then the device has to have remote management turned on, and finally the attacker would have to have the device's serial number (which seems to be used as a security mechanism) in order to successfully send the device commands. Also, if you don't like needles, don't watch the youtube video at the bottom of the post :|
  - d0ne 15y ago
    This is assuming you only want to control the pump. If the individual is unable to view any information on their monitor, or their monitor is displaying improper data, it may cause other serious health issues in high risk patients. Not to mention that some devices may be controlled by the monitoring device and it may require a constant stream of good data. I agree that not all setups and individuals are at risk but some most likely are.
- yread 15y ago
  RSA is a little bit too computationally intensive for these devices I'm afraid
lubutu 15y ago
I'm unsure where I stand on this subject, but this excerpt from Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not A Gadget" seems relevant: "There are respectable academic conferences devoted to methods of violating sanctities of all kinds. The only criterion is that researchers come up with some way of using digital technology to harm innocent people who thought they were safe. ... "If the same researchers had done something similar without digital technology, they would at the very least have lost their jobs. Suppose they had spent a couple of years and significant funds figuring out how to rig a washing machine to poison clothing in order to (hypothetically) kill a child once dressed."
- _delirium 15y ago
  Don't people get paid to look for security vulnerabilities in pretty much any engineering field? There are people who work full-time on thinking up ways that a terrorist could potentially rig a chemical plant to release deadly gases, for example.
  - lubutu 15y ago
    I suppose there are, but I'm not so sure they have fancy open conferences devoted to chemical plant terrorism. Like I said, I don't know where I stand.
    - MiguelHudnandez 15y ago
      Would you feel more comfortable if a few smart people figured out the same things and didn't tell anyone about it, but instead used it for profit or to cause harm to innocent people?
- jerf 15y ago
  The threat model is totally different, so the metaphor fails horribly. I could, theoretically, do some horrible thing to a chemical plant, but if I'm going to put that much physical effort into it, driving a truck bomb up to it is way easier. Preventing that attack is infeasibly expensive. So the obscure stuff is hardly relevant anyhow, when the straightforward stuff works fine. I could, theoretically, hack a medical device to do something horrible... in which case I might be able to kill someone untraceably, from the other side of the country, with no consequences to myself, and possible dozens or thousands of people at a time, and all it would have taken to protect against this is a programmer adding one line of code that would have checked for the buffer overflow. Or using one of the languages designed with preventing buffer overflows in mind. It's two things so different that they just aren't comparable. We aren't going to secure our electronic devices by not spending time thinking about how to secure them, and that can not help but manifest as ways to attack them.
timmyd 15y ago
As per the other post: tl;dr Scott's most relevant points: 1. "This is a key fob that looks like a car alarm beeper that some pump users use to discretely give themselves insulin doses. However, I feel the need to point out as a pump wearer myself that: Not every Insulin Pump has a remote control feature. Not every remote-controllable insulin pump has that feature turned on. Mine does not, for example." 2. "all he requires to perpetrate the hack is the target pump's serial number. This is like saying "I can open your garage door with a 3rd party garage door opener. Just give me the numbers off the side of your unit..." 3. If you are a diabetic on a pump who is concerned about this kind of thing, my suggestion is to turn off your pump's remote control feature (which is likely off anyway) and turn off your sensor radio when you are not wearing your CGM. Most of all, don't panic. Call the manufacturer and express your concern. In my experience, pump manufacturers do not mess around with this stuff. I'm not overly concerned. -- Also - someone asked how much entropy was in the serial ID's on these units ? Even if entropy is low are - how are you going to randomly select a person, and know their serial ID ? Unless you know what units are distributed to what hospitals/doctors - at exact times - at exact shipments and then from the sample delivered know the exact unit given to any person at any particular time. Sure, if you know a "set of id's" you could try each one sequentially until you finally get a hit - but even then, you must somehow ensure the person being targeted has remote connection turned on. I'm pretty sure walking up to them and saying "oh, hai 'dere! ... plz turn on ur remotz connetz'n 4 me?" [ said in this voice - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh_9QhRzJEs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh_9QhRzJEs ] - is going to make them pretty suspicious. There's a lot of "ifs" in there and frankly - if your aim was kill them - it would be a lot faster to do it some other way because to actually get all these things to line up perfectly .... your chances are pretty slim. I'm a bit of sceptic on this 'hacking' - not to say that it's great that it has been uncovered - but your dealing with minute hardware where every single ms of processing power counts. Simple encryption should be utilized [but then this might be easily hacked anyway ?] but for units placed inside the body [pacemakers and the like] - splitting the units resources between keeping the patient alive vs. encryption for wireless protocols seems to weigh more heavily on the former than the later given how unlikely - for the majority of the world - these 'attacks' are going to be.
- patio11 15y ago
darklajid 15y ago
I'd have liked a medical approach to this FUD. Can anyone with more insight than me (medical background perhaps? Or 'experienced' diabetic, since I think this leads to a specific background just as well) tell me what attack vector this could open? I don't want to play this down, the argument just doesn't match with what I (think to) know, so - please educate me. Isn't the maximum dose limited by the pump? And the models I've seen seem to take a long time to inject something (with a step motor, for these things). What could you do to the 'victim'? Supressing the basal/ongoing rate would send them on a high level of blood sugar, something that I'd expect leads to a very clear reaction: The person, if ~experienced~, will feel nasty, check the pump (maybe the battery died and you didn't hear the alarm. Maybe something with the injection needle went wrong), measure glucose level again and - depending on the result - apply a 'fast' insulin via direct injection. Am I glossing over something here? Injecting a large(r) amount of insulin would, with a delay that seems to be related to the type of insulin used, send the person into dangerous low levels of blood sugar. Unless this hits at once though, I'd again expect the person to _know_ that there's something wrong if you start craving for every food you can imagine. Probably you'll feel like shit and start shaking etc. pp. I assume this is the more dangerous route, but again the first reaction is probably 'Fuck diabetes, what's going on with my levels', a check of the current sugar levels and direct counter measures (if it's not too bad: Juice, fructose etc. Otherwise you probably have again an injection nearby). After typing all this I DO wonder what happens if someone causes this in your sleep though... So - can someone tell me how wrong I am and tell me about the purely medical dangers?
- JshWright 15y ago
  Dropping an unexpected dose of insulin would be much more dangerous than simply disabling the pump. Disabling the pump would result in an increasing level of blood glucose over a fairly long period of time (likely a day or two). I would be very surprised if a 'victim' didn't notice the issue with their pump long before there were any detectable side effects. Dumping an unexpected shot of insulin into the victim's system would crash their blood glucose over a fairly short period of time (an hour or two). One of the first side effects of hypoglycemia is confusion, which would reduce their chances of noticing something is wrong. Long story short: I wouldn't worry about "DoS'sing" the pump, but I would worry about triggering extra insulin "dosings". My experience with insulin pumps is limited to dealing with patients who are having some sort of blood glucose related emergency (as an EMT).
Singletoned 15y ago
To be honest, the facts are kind of boring, and the fear-mongering is kind of dramatic. I can definitely see how, if they didn't care about the abstract concept of truth, people could prefer to pay attention to the fear-mongering.
- _phred 15y ago
  You're right, it /would/ make for good TV drama: an evil nursing home wants to kick some malingering diabetics off of their rolls in order to make space for newer and more lucrative patients. The management cook up a scheme to hack the patients' insulin pumps in order to kill people quietly in their sleep. Our crack team of hackers is called to the murder scene when an potential victim's relative notices them behaving strangely on a morning when they visit along with an anomalously low blood sugar reading! Yeah, it sounds a bit far-fetched even for TV.
hugh3 15y ago
I'm much less concerned about vulnerabilities which will allow people to kill me than about vulnerabilities which will enable people to steal my data or money. There's far more people who want to steal my data or money than who want to kill me, and if somebody does want to kill me and can get within range of me then there's several thousand other ways to do it.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  You're assuming a mass harvesting in the theft instance, and someone with a personal grudge against you in the second. I wouldn't be worried about Mysterious Assassin out to kill Pavel Lishin, Diabetic With A Pump. I'd be worried about Teenage Sociopath, war-driving past a clinic.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    But I would hope that even Teenage Sociopath is smart enough to figure out that this is equivalent to just shooting up the clinic with a gun. Or, even if you think he's less likely to get caught, the world is full of undetectable opportunities to kill random people. Poison the fruit at the supermarket. Sabotage the train line. It doesn't happen very often.
    - jerf 15y ago
      Two points: Why argue about this at all? Securing known-in-advance endpoints isn't impossible. Why not just do it, and stop arguing? Second: The relevant risk metric isn't "For a given person, is someone going to try to kill them today?" The relevant metric is "For all such remote-controlled implanted devices (including not just "insulin pumps" but any potentially dangerous device) placed in all human beings across the entire lifetime of both the implanted devices and the human beings, what are the odds someone will be attacked via this vulnerability and physically harmed?" to which the answer is trivial: 100%, rounded to the nearest thousandth of a percent. Don't argue about it, fix it. (Oh, and narrowing it down to "technically-skilled teenage sociopaths" is cognitively hazardous, even in casual debate. That's not even close to the full threat model and encourages subconscious dismissal of very real threats not sourced from that narrow group.)
sabat 15y ago
The Weekly World News once reported that a new, deadly computer virus could make your computer explode. Seems sort of prophetic now, given the media frenzy. http://books.google.com/books?id=9ewDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40&dq=weekly+world+news+computer+virus&source=bl&ots=2G50Gert-I&sig=zuxQYUAqCz_Lzs7q5qnxTvJapo8&hl=en&ei=kQA8TqKGNuriiAKqkKz0Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=weekly%20world%20news%20computer%20virus&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=9ewDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA40&#3...
jmcarlin 15y ago
The notion that you can kill a person with diabetes by hacking their insulin pump is absurdly ridiculous. I can't think of an insulin pump that does not have a setting to limit the maximum bolus. In addition, the setting typically has a sane value and is enabled by default. Further, when a pump is setup with a doctor/nurse practitioner, this value is set to number that is tuned to the person with diabetes. There is also feedback when the pump is delivering insulin. I know this is the case with Animas and Medtronic pumps. So even if someone got in range, had your serial number, knew the protocol and attempted an insane dosage, the worst that would happen is someone didn't notice the delivery feedback and hit the max bolus. While this would be worst case breach, it is not lethal. Within an hour, the victim will feel hypoglycemic, check their blood glucose and correct it.
hsmyers 15y ago
As a diabetic (something few of the posters seem to be) I find this discussion quite interesting if a little wrong in some of its assumptions. The first is the idea that turning off the pump will cause the wearer to expire. In most cases, not true. If you want to (and lets wave our magic wand and enable the hack skipping the tech problems mentioned) kill your target, you are going about it the wrong way. Don't turn off the supply---turn it up, way up. You need to create an overdose based on the size of the individual and their tolerance to insulin. Now without knowing the details of the pump industry, I'd guess that there are built in limiters concerning overdoses. This makes the problem far more challenging, even if you know the individual in question. How often do you discuss with your diabetic friends just how many units it would take to kill them? At a guess, even if you know they are diabetic, this is probably not part of normal conversation. There is also the assumption that the wearer never checks his equipment. In the single photo in the article above, I notice a screen crowded with information. Again jumping over the problems listed both in the article and here, the hack would have to adjust the display so as not to warn the victim. Given the in-ability to decipher the signals transmitted, this seems a bit problematic at best. No, I think the best method of attack is the one with a hammer---'Wow you wear a pump huh? Can I see it (victim looks down to pull up shirt) villain applies Maxwell's hammer as solution.'
- _phred 15y ago
  I helped watch a friend's kid last weekend who has a remote-controlled insulin pump. The remote control refuses to dose without a recent blood-sugar test. Kid wants to eat, no you need to wait, we need to do a finger-prick test first ON the the remote so it knows your glucose level. That, and the remote needs to establish an insulin baseline every few hours. It's unclear whether the dose limiting is also hard-coded into the pump or is on the remote side only. It does seem like a "one in a billion" attack but, given time and repeated access to the pump radio, it seems possible to say the least. I assume that an adult diabetic is very aware of how glucose levels affect their ability to function and would notice when they start to drop off unexpectedly.
- xpaulbettsx 15y ago
  Even if you could manipulate the pump control itself, you still aren't disabling the feature that shows the blood glucose level (which the person is certainly monitoring), or the alarms that most likely go off when the values are too far outside of center. The most likely outcome of a hacker gaining control, is that the user sees the insulin pump is screwing up, then just takes it off and uses manual injections or sees their doctor.
shaggyfrog 15y ago
This was the plotline of a 3rd season episode of Law & Order, "Virus". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0629490/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0629490/

163 points by phsr 15y ago

d0ne 15y ago

The gentlemen who wrote this post takes an approach I'm not comfortable supporting: The signal and commands haven't been successfully reversed engineered yet so this isn't a real threat. A little bit about my background: 10+ years successfully (legally) reverse engineering software technology that required both client software and packet manipulation in industries that have been very proactive against it. Seeing as the medical devices are hardware items issued to unique individual recipients the issue could easily be fixed with a 1024+ Public Private Key-Pair between the devices unique to each issuance. However, this does nothing to protect the many millions of individuals, using today's devices, potentially exposed to the threat described by Jay Radcliffe.

bullsbarry 15y ago
It's a little less severe than that. First the device has to support remote management, then the device has to have remote management turned on, and finally the attacker would have to have the device's serial number (which seems to be used as a security mechanism) in order to successfully send the device commands. Also, if you don't like needles, don't watch the youtube video at the bottom of the post :|
- d0ne 15y ago
  This is assuming you only want to control the pump. If the individual is unable to view any information on their monitor, or their monitor is displaying improper data, it may cause other serious health issues in high risk patients. Not to mention that some devices may be controlled by the monitoring device and it may require a constant stream of good data. I agree that not all setups and individuals are at risk but some most likely are.
yread 15y ago
RSA is a little bit too computationally intensive for these devices I'm afraid

lubutu 15y ago

I'm unsure where I stand on this subject, but this excerpt from Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not A Gadget" seems relevant: "There are respectable academic conferences devoted to methods of violating sanctities of all kinds. The only criterion is that researchers come up with some way of using digital technology to harm innocent people who thought they were safe. ... "If the same researchers had done something similar without digital technology, they would at the very least have lost their jobs. Suppose they had spent a couple of years and significant funds figuring out how to rig a washing machine to poison clothing in order to (hypothetically) kill a child once dressed."

_delirium 15y ago
Don't people get paid to look for security vulnerabilities in pretty much any engineering field? There are people who work full-time on thinking up ways that a terrorist could potentially rig a chemical plant to release deadly gases, for example.
- lubutu 15y ago
  I suppose there are, but I'm not so sure they have fancy open conferences devoted to chemical plant terrorism. Like I said, I don't know where I stand.
  - MiguelHudnandez 15y ago
    Would you feel more comfortable if a few smart people figured out the same things and didn't tell anyone about it, but instead used it for profit or to cause harm to innocent people?
jerf 15y ago
The threat model is totally different, so the metaphor fails horribly. I could, theoretically, do some horrible thing to a chemical plant, but if I'm going to put that much physical effort into it, driving a truck bomb up to it is way easier. Preventing that attack is infeasibly expensive. So the obscure stuff is hardly relevant anyhow, when the straightforward stuff works fine. I could, theoretically, hack a medical device to do something horrible... in which case I might be able to kill someone untraceably, from the other side of the country, with no consequences to myself, and possible dozens or thousands of people at a time, and all it would have taken to protect against this is a programmer adding one line of code that would have checked for the buffer overflow. Or using one of the languages designed with preventing buffer overflows in mind. It's two things so different that they just aren't comparable. We aren't going to secure our electronic devices by not spending time thinking about how to secure them, and that can not help but manifest as ways to attack them.

timmyd 15y ago

As per the other post: tl;dr Scott's most relevant points: 1. "This is a key fob that looks like a car alarm beeper that some pump users use to discretely give themselves insulin doses. However, I feel the need to point out as a pump wearer myself that: Not every Insulin Pump has a remote control feature. Not every remote-controllable insulin pump has that feature turned on. Mine does not, for example." 2. "all he requires to perpetrate the hack is the target pump's serial number. This is like saying "I can open your garage door with a 3rd party garage door opener. Just give me the numbers off the side of your unit..." 3. If you are a diabetic on a pump who is concerned about this kind of thing, my suggestion is to turn off your pump's remote control feature (which is likely off anyway) and turn off your sensor radio when you are not wearing your CGM. Most of all, don't panic. Call the manufacturer and express your concern. In my experience, pump manufacturers do not mess around with this stuff. I'm not overly concerned. -- Also - someone asked how much entropy was in the serial ID's on these units ? Even if entropy is low are - how are you going to randomly select a person, and know their serial ID ? Unless you know what units are distributed to what hospitals/doctors - at exact times - at exact shipments and then from the sample delivered know the exact unit given to any person at any particular time. Sure, if you know a "set of id's" you could try each one sequentially until you finally get a hit - but even then, you must somehow ensure the person being targeted has remote connection turned on. I'm pretty sure walking up to them and saying "oh, hai 'dere! ... plz turn on ur remotz connetz'n 4 me?" [ said in this voice - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh_9QhRzJEs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh_9QhRzJEs ] - is going to make them pretty suspicious. There's a lot of "ifs" in there and frankly - if your aim was kill them - it would be a lot faster to do it some other way because to actually get all these things to line up perfectly .... your chances are pretty slim. I'm a bit of sceptic on this 'hacking' - not to say that it's great that it has been uncovered - but your dealing with minute hardware where every single ms of processing power counts. Simple encryption should be utilized [but then this might be easily hacked anyway ?] but for units placed inside the body [pacemakers and the like] - splitting the units resources between keeping the patient alive vs. encryption for wireless protocols seems to weigh more heavily on the former than the later given how unlikely - for the majority of the world - these 'attacks' are going to be.

patio11 15y ago

darklajid 15y ago

I'd have liked a medical approach to this FUD. Can anyone with more insight than me (medical background perhaps? Or 'experienced' diabetic, since I think this leads to a specific background just as well) tell me what attack vector this could open? I don't want to play this down, the argument just doesn't match with what I (think to) know, so - please educate me. Isn't the maximum dose limited by the pump? And the models I've seen seem to take a long time to inject something (with a step motor, for these things). What could you do to the 'victim'? Supressing the basal/ongoing rate would send them on a high level of blood sugar, something that I'd expect leads to a very clear reaction: The person, if ~experienced~, will feel nasty, check the pump (maybe the battery died and you didn't hear the alarm. Maybe something with the injection needle went wrong), measure glucose level again and - depending on the result - apply a 'fast' insulin via direct injection. Am I glossing over something here? Injecting a large(r) amount of insulin would, with a delay that seems to be related to the type of insulin used, send the person into dangerous low levels of blood sugar. Unless this hits at once though, I'd again expect the person to _know_ that there's something wrong if you start craving for every food you can imagine. Probably you'll feel like shit and start shaking etc. pp. I assume this is the more dangerous route, but again the first reaction is probably 'Fuck diabetes, what's going on with my levels', a check of the current sugar levels and direct counter measures (if it's not too bad: Juice, fructose etc. Otherwise you probably have again an injection nearby). After typing all this I DO wonder what happens if someone causes this in your sleep though... So - can someone tell me how wrong I am and tell me about the purely medical dangers?

JshWright 15y ago
Dropping an unexpected dose of insulin would be much more dangerous than simply disabling the pump. Disabling the pump would result in an increasing level of blood glucose over a fairly long period of time (likely a day or two). I would be very surprised if a 'victim' didn't notice the issue with their pump long before there were any detectable side effects. Dumping an unexpected shot of insulin into the victim's system would crash their blood glucose over a fairly short period of time (an hour or two). One of the first side effects of hypoglycemia is confusion, which would reduce their chances of noticing something is wrong. Long story short: I wouldn't worry about "DoS'sing" the pump, but I would worry about triggering extra insulin "dosings". My experience with insulin pumps is limited to dealing with patients who are having some sort of blood glucose related emergency (as an EMT).

Singletoned 15y ago

To be honest, the facts are kind of boring, and the fear-mongering is kind of dramatic. I can definitely see how, if they didn't care about the abstract concept of truth, people could prefer to pay attention to the fear-mongering.

_phred 15y ago
You're right, it /would/ make for good TV drama: an evil nursing home wants to kick some malingering diabetics off of their rolls in order to make space for newer and more lucrative patients. The management cook up a scheme to hack the patients' insulin pumps in order to kill people quietly in their sleep. Our crack team of hackers is called to the murder scene when an potential victim's relative notices them behaving strangely on a morning when they visit along with an anomalously low blood sugar reading! Yeah, it sounds a bit far-fetched even for TV.

hugh3 15y ago

I'm much less concerned about vulnerabilities which will allow people to kill me than about vulnerabilities which will enable people to steal my data or money. There's far more people who want to steal my data or money than who want to kill me, and if somebody does want to kill me and can get within range of me then there's several thousand other ways to do it.

pavel_lishin 15y ago
You're assuming a mass harvesting in the theft instance, and someone with a personal grudge against you in the second. I wouldn't be worried about Mysterious Assassin out to kill Pavel Lishin, Diabetic With A Pump. I'd be worried about Teenage Sociopath, war-driving past a clinic.
- hugh3 15y ago
  But I would hope that even Teenage Sociopath is smart enough to figure out that this is equivalent to just shooting up the clinic with a gun. Or, even if you think he's less likely to get caught, the world is full of undetectable opportunities to kill random people. Poison the fruit at the supermarket. Sabotage the train line. It doesn't happen very often.
  - jerf 15y ago
    Two points: Why argue about this at all? Securing known-in-advance endpoints isn't impossible. Why not just do it, and stop arguing? Second: The relevant risk metric isn't "For a given person, is someone going to try to kill them today?" The relevant metric is "For all such remote-controlled implanted devices (including not just "insulin pumps" but any potentially dangerous device) placed in all human beings across the entire lifetime of both the implanted devices and the human beings, what are the odds someone will be attacked via this vulnerability and physically harmed?" to which the answer is trivial: 100%, rounded to the nearest thousandth of a percent. Don't argue about it, fix it. (Oh, and narrowing it down to "technically-skilled teenage sociopaths" is cognitively hazardous, even in casual debate. That's not even close to the full threat model and encourages subconscious dismissal of very real threats not sourced from that narrow group.)

sabat 15y ago

The Weekly World News once reported that a new, deadly computer virus could make your computer explode. Seems sort of prophetic now, given the media frenzy. http://books.google.com/books?id=9ewDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40&dq=weekly+world+news+computer+virus&source=bl&ots=2G50Gert-I&sig=zuxQYUAqCz_Lzs7q5qnxTvJapo8&hl=en&ei=kQA8TqKGNuriiAKqkKz0Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=weekly%20world%20news%20computer%20virus&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=9ewDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA40&#3...

jmcarlin 15y ago

The notion that you can kill a person with diabetes by hacking their insulin pump is absurdly ridiculous. I can't think of an insulin pump that does not have a setting to limit the maximum bolus. In addition, the setting typically has a sane value and is enabled by default. Further, when a pump is setup with a doctor/nurse practitioner, this value is set to number that is tuned to the person with diabetes. There is also feedback when the pump is delivering insulin. I know this is the case with Animas and Medtronic pumps. So even if someone got in range, had your serial number, knew the protocol and attempted an insane dosage, the worst that would happen is someone didn't notice the delivery feedback and hit the max bolus. While this would be worst case breach, it is not lethal. Within an hour, the victim will feel hypoglycemic, check their blood glucose and correct it.

hsmyers 15y ago

As a diabetic (something few of the posters seem to be) I find this discussion quite interesting if a little wrong in some of its assumptions. The first is the idea that turning off the pump will cause the wearer to expire. In most cases, not true. If you want to (and lets wave our magic wand and enable the hack skipping the tech problems mentioned) kill your target, you are going about it the wrong way. Don't turn off the supply---turn it up, way up. You need to create an overdose based on the size of the individual and their tolerance to insulin. Now without knowing the details of the pump industry, I'd guess that there are built in limiters concerning overdoses. This makes the problem far more challenging, even if you know the individual in question. How often do you discuss with your diabetic friends just how many units it would take to kill them? At a guess, even if you know they are diabetic, this is probably not part of normal conversation. There is also the assumption that the wearer never checks his equipment. In the single photo in the article above, I notice a screen crowded with information. Again jumping over the problems listed both in the article and here, the hack would have to adjust the display so as not to warn the victim. Given the in-ability to decipher the signals transmitted, this seems a bit problematic at best. No, I think the best method of attack is the one with a hammer---'Wow you wear a pump huh? Can I see it (victim looks down to pull up shirt) villain applies Maxwell's hammer as solution.'

_phred 15y ago
I helped watch a friend's kid last weekend who has a remote-controlled insulin pump. The remote control refuses to dose without a recent blood-sugar test. Kid wants to eat, no you need to wait, we need to do a finger-prick test first ON the the remote so it knows your glucose level. That, and the remote needs to establish an insulin baseline every few hours. It's unclear whether the dose limiting is also hard-coded into the pump or is on the remote side only. It does seem like a "one in a billion" attack but, given time and repeated access to the pump radio, it seems possible to say the least. I assume that an adult diabetic is very aware of how glucose levels affect their ability to function and would notice when they start to drop off unexpectedly.
xpaulbettsx 15y ago
Even if you could manipulate the pump control itself, you still aren't disabling the feature that shows the blood glucose level (which the person is certainly monitoring), or the alarms that most likely go off when the values are too far outside of center. The most likely outcome of a hacker gaining control, is that the user sees the insulin pump is screwing up, then just takes it off and uses manual injections or sees their doctor.

shaggyfrog 15y ago

This was the plotline of a 3rd season episode of Law & Order, "Virus". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0629490/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0629490/