Security Experts Hack Teleoperated Surgical Robot

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/537001/security-experts-hack-teleoperated-surgical-robot/

MIT Technology Review
Emerging Technology From the arXiv
April 24, 2015

A crucial bottleneck that prevents life-saving surgery being performed in 
many parts of the world is the lack of trained surgeons. One way to get 
around this is to make better use of the ones that are available.

Sending them over great distances to perform operations is clearly 
inefficient because of the time that has to be spent travelling. So an 
increasingly important alternative is the possibility of telesurgery with 
an expert in one place controlling a robot in another that physically 
performs the necessary cutting and dicing. Indeed, the sale of medical 
robots is increasing at a rate of 20 percent per year.

But while the advantages are clear, the disadvantages have been less well 
explored. Telesurgery relies on cutting edge technologies in fields as 
diverse as computing, robotics, communications, ergonomics, and so on. And 
anybody familiar with these areas will tell you that they are far from 
failsafe.

Today, Tamara Bonaci and pals at the University of Washington in Seattle 
examine the special pitfalls associated with the communications technology 
involved in telesurgery. In particular, they show how a malicious attacker 
can disrupt the behavior of a telerobot during surgery and even take over 
such a robot, the first time a medical robot has been hacked in this way.

[...]



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