The U.S. Department of Homeland Security Thursday issued an advisory warning people of severe vulnerabilities in over a dozen heart defibrillators that could allow attackers to fully hijack them remotely, potentially putting lives of millions of patients at risk.
Cardioverter Defibrillator is a small surgically implanted device (in patients’ chests) that gives a patient’s heart an electric shock (often called a countershock) to re-establish a normal heartbeat.
While the device has been designed to prevent sudden death, several implanted cardiac defibrillators made by one of the world’s largest medical device companies Medtronic have been found vulnerable to two serious vulnerabilities.
Discovered by researchers from security firm Clever Security, the vulnerabilities could allow threat actors with knowledge of medical devices to intercept and potentially impact the functionality of these life-saving devices.
“Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow an attacker with adjacent short-range access to one of the affected products to interfere with, generate, modify, or intercept the radio frequency (RF) communication of the Medtronic proprietary Conexus telemetry system, potentially impacting product functionality and/or allowing access to transmitted sensitive data,” warns the advisory released by DHS.
The vulnerabilities reside in the Conexus Radio Frequency Telemetry Protocol—a wireless communication system used by some of Medtronic defibrillators and their control units to wirelessly connect to implanted devices over the air using radio-waves.
Flaw 1: Lack of Authentication in Medtronic’s Implantable Defibrillators
According to an advisory [PDF] published by Medtronic, these flaws affect more than 20 products, 16 of which are implantable defibrillators and rest are the defibrillators’ bedside monitors and programmers.
The more critical flaw of the two is CVE-2019-6538 which occurs because the Conexus telemetry protocol does not include any checks for data tampering, nor performs any form of authentication or authorization.
images from Hacker News
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