Professor Kevin Fu Answers Your Questions About Medical Device Security

Almost a year ago you had a chance to ask professor Kevin Fu about medical device security. A number of events (including the collapse of his house) conspired to delay the answering of those questions. Professor Fu has finally found respite from calamity, coincidentally at a time when the FDA has issued guidance on the security of medical devices. Below you’ll find his answers to your old but not forgotten questions.

Fu: I apologize for the year-long delay, but my queue has rather overflowed after part of my house collapsed. See slide #11 for more information on the delay.

Medical device security is a challenging area because it covers a rather large set of disciplines including software engineering, clinical care, patient safety, electrical engineering, human factors, physiology, regulatory affairs, cryptography, etc. There are a lot of well meaning security engineers who have not yet mastered the culture and principles of health care and medicine, and similarly there are a lot of well meaning medical device manufacturers who have not yet mastered the culture and principles of information security and privacy. I started out as a gopher handing out authentication tokens for a paperless medical record system at a hospital in the early 1990s, but in the last decade have focused my attention on security of embedded devices with application to health and wellness.

I huddled with graduate students from my SPQR Lab at Michigan, and we wrote up the following responses to the great questions. We were not able to answer every question, but readers can find years worth of in-depth technical papers on blog.secure-medicine.org and spqr.eecs.umich.edu/publications.php and thaw.org.

Link to the original slashdot posting here.