Researchers Mount Cyberattacks Against Surgery Robot

An anonymous reader writes: A group of researchers from University of Washington have tested the security of a teleoperated robotic surgery system created by their colleagues, and have found it severely lacking. "Teleoperated surgical robots will be expected to use a combination of existing publicly available networks and temporary ad-hoc wireless and satellite networks to send video, audio and other sensory information between surgeons and remote robots. It is envisioned these systems will be used to provide immediate medical relief in under-developed rural terrains, areas of natural and human-caused disasters, and in battlefield scenarios," the researchers noted, and asked: "But what if these robotic systems are attacked and compromised?"

Comments

No excuse for this

[davidwr]

You can't completely prevent your communication going down due to malice, accident, or acts of nature. When those fail you have to have a backup plan such as going into a failsafe mode.

BUT You can and must detect interference and either correct for it or treat it like a total communications failure. There is no excuse for being fooled into taking instructions from an unauthorized party (well, unless the instruction is "you think I'm hacking your communications but I'm really doing a side-channel attack to trick you into doing what you normally do when you lose communications, now obey me and do what you normally do when your communications are hosed, thank you.").