Securing medical in the IoT

Suzanne Deffree, EDN
November 24, 2015

You may remember Jay Radcliffe as the white hat hacker who in 2011 took the stage at a security conference and showed that the wireless communication in his own insulin pump was not secure and could be subjected to attack.

Radcliffe, diagnosed with diabetes at age 22, found the hack of the necessary medical device “surprisingly easy” and, obviously, concerning as the pump could be hacked to provide a lethal dose of insulin. His presentation shed much-needed light on security design in medical devices, a rapidly developing segment of IoT (the Internet of Things), the designs for which have the potential to be not only health- and life-improving but life-saving.

Radcliffe, now a highly regarded senior security consultant and researcher for Rapid7 and keynote speaker at next week’s Designers of Things conference, recently spoke to EDN about IoT and medical devices, what it means to be a hacker, how security needs to be engineered into medical devices, and FDA oversight. Below are excerpts of that conversation.

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