Has Cheney Been Fitted with a Kill Switch?
August 10th, 2008Dick Cheney’s life depends on a device that can be accessed remotely and commanded arbitrarily with readily available hardware and software.
In 2001, Cheney received a Medtronic implantable cardioverter-defibrillator. See: Device in Cheney’s Chest Helps Veep’s Ticker Keep Time:
July 2, 2001 — Small technology is at the heart of an advanced pacemaker implanted in Vice President Dick Cheney’s chest on Saturday.
The Medtronic GEM III DR, a pacemaker and implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD), now constantly records Cheney’s heart activity and can speed up or slow down an irregular rhythm. And it’s all in a package the size of a small pager.
MEMS accelerometer, which monitors the heart’s activity level, works alongside a microprocessor to detect the level and deliver more electricity to keep the heart in rhythm. In the case of the ICD, the device delivers a high-energy electrical shock to bring the ventricles back to normal rhythm.
“It’s an emergency room in your chest,” said Bob Hanvik, a spokesman for Medtronic Inc., the Minneapolis-based market leader in pacemaker and ICD sales. “It actually recognizes when a potentially life-threatening arrhythmia might occur, and gives you a shock before it can escalate to life-threatening.
“That’s why Cheney described it as an ‘insurance policy.’ … Ultimately, the hope is it would never have to deliver therapy, but it’s nice to know it’s there.”
After reading the recently released paper, Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: Software Radio Attacks and Zero-Power Defenses, it would appear that the U.S. Secret Service will want to review Cheney’s, “insurance policy.”
Maybe they can wheel him around in a Faraday cage in the meantime???
Note: I’ve disabled comments on this post because they could easily result in problems with the U.S. Secret Service.
Via: Venture Beat:
The Defcon conference is the wild and woolly version of Black Hat for the unwashed masses of hackers. It always has its share of unusual hacks. The oddest so far is a collaborative academic effort where medical device security researchers have figured out how to turn off someone’s pacemaker via remote control. They previously disclosed the paper at a conference in May. But the larger point of the vulnerability of all wirelessly-controlled medical devices remains a hot topic here at the show in Las Vegas.
Let’s not have a collective heart attack, at least not yet. The people on the right side of the security fence are the ones who have figured this out so far. But this has very serious implications for the 2.6 million people who had pacemakers installed from 1990 to 2002 (the stats available from the researchers). It also presents product liability problems for the five companies that make pace makers.
…
Fu and Halperin said they used a cheap $1,000 system to mimic the control mechanism. It included a software radio, GNU radio software, and other electronics. They could use that to eavesdrop on private data such as the identity of the patient, the doctor, the diagnosis, and the pacemaker instructions. They figured out how to control the pacemaker with their device.
“You can induce the test mode, drain the device battery, and turn off therapies,” Halperin said.
Translation: you can kill the patient.
