The TV headline is hyperbolic, but the content is level headed.

Tammy Leitner of NBC Chicago interviewed a number of patients, physicians, and researchers about the challenges of medical device security. Here’s a link to the full video.

Had this interview happened in 2008, the tone would have likely been more confrontational. Remember when Archimedes researchers demonstrated radio-controlled security flaws in pacemaker/defibrillators (also see the Schneier commentary)? Back in 2008, manufacturers and FDA were not accustomed to interacting with security researchers reporting such software-based flaws. It’s completely understandable. Imagine if an unfamiliar person showed up at your front door to point out security problems of your house. The outcome might be unpleasant. Thus, interactions initially got off to a rocky start. But that’s the past.

Fast forward to 2014, and times have changed significantly for the better. The forward-thinking manufacturers, influential researchers, and health care providers regularly interact and help each other to improve medical device security. A few positive examples that brought researchers, clinicians, manufacturers, and regulators together include the draft technical information report on medical device cybersecurity by AAMI (the IETF equivalent of the medical manufacturing world), the Archimedes workshop, and the upcoming FDA workshop on medical device security.

So if you’re a future graduate student or budding security researcher, I’d encourage you to read the technical papers from the short history of medical device security. It’s no longer a cat-and-mouse game of pointing out buffer overflows and SQL injection attacks. The future is about interdisciplinary computing and health care research to produce technology, best practices, and policies that improve medical device security without interfering with the workflow or delivery of health care.