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nearfar47 t1_j5x698h wrote

Reply to comment by duffmanhb in An ALS patient set a record for communicating via a brain implant: 62 words per minute by esprit-de-lescalier

LOL there are 3 mfgs of Deep Brain Stimulation hardware (primarily for Parkinson's Disease, but also essential tremor) in the world.

Of those, Boston Scientific IS bluetooth. But its app only comes for iOS, not Android. So you have to switch to Apple.

Bluetooth has security problems though. These brain implants have drivers that could harm the brain if firmware tells it to do that, and the firmware can be updated wirelessly. The battery unit is implanted in the shoulder and charged wirelessly. So a targeted hack could be deadly, and you couldn't turn it "off" without a box cutter and pull it out all Terminator-style.

Hypothetically, bluetooth has systemic vulnerabilities, and someone could write a script searching for BT IoT devices to spread their virus and/or conduct a DDS attack. This could infect a stranger's PC at the airport, it goes looking for BT devices, finds your brain implant with a security vulnerability and takes it over.

That's highly unlikely, but in 2019 someone demonstrated an implanted defibrillator could be reprogrammed remotely with code that could be fatal (not demonstrated on a living person). The mfg didn't consider protection from intentional attacks to be part of the design spec, that was absurd when it was designed. It had checksums and all to make sure it was receiving valid data and checked the whole image, but that's not security. Someone just had to reverse-engineer the radio traffic and how to get it to load it as a firmware or settings update.

Since then, that mfg (not Boston Scientific) changed to a proprietary protocol with a communicator bridge that has to be very close to the implant to communicate. But that bridge does work off bluetooth AFAIK, but the communicator has to be physically over the implant to communicate.

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duffmanhb t1_j5y0bmf wrote

I mean, considering these are all in the early prototype and experimentation phases, I don't think you need to worry about a hacker creating a bespoke virus specifically for the 5 people on the planet who would have one.

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Diamondsfullofclubs t1_j5y2d2v wrote

Why develop a tech that may be widely used and easily compromised in the future?

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duffmanhb t1_j5y3gte wrote

Changing data transfer mediums is the insanely easy part. The hard part is the tech itself. Switching over to a custom secured wireless protocol is just a minor hardware and software change. In the meantime, just use something wireless, and clamp down on security once it's ready for market.

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nearfar47 t1_j5yg6gt wrote

It could be incidental. Bluetooth isn't a really high secure protocol, and has known security vulnerabilities. It's hypothetically possible a mfg could get a standard, well-accepted off-the-shelf IP block that has an unknown security hole.

Someone writes a virus for Windows machines that activates bluetooth and attempts to reprogram any and all bluetooth devices within its short range. A few devices using this IP can be hijacked to spread the virus to other bluetooth-enabled Windows machines, or use its uninfected Windows drivers' call-home-for-updates function redirected to another IP# to join a DDOS on a bank later.

Say the DDOS won't actually work on the pacemaker's call-home-for-updates because the driver has no such capability. But the attack did try to rewrite the device's bluetooth firmware and partially succeeded. Then the implant gets junk data from its bluetooth firmware block, the virus sees it's a common Corex M4 core and reprograms its firmware in an attempt to turn it into a DDOS slave, which renders the core functions broken. Its hardware peripherals like the pulse generator get random writes to its registers when this malware mistakenly thinks these addresses went to a peripheral for a long-range radio transceiver for an AirTag. Now the pulse generator is stuck with random, nonsense values which could immediately send out deadly signals to the amplifiers.

Is it likely? I'd say no. But it's a farfetched, yet plausible scenario.

Funny fact- all these devices currently have hard fault modes where if the lead voltages don't make sense or a hard fault occurs, the device will go into "POR" mode- Power On Reset- which, for safety- will not try to reboot with suspicious hardware problems but lock it up until you bring yourself in for service diagnostics and get re-enabled.

With one model, going shopping in a foreign country with different radio frequency use outside the US's FCC-approval spectrum use the device was tested for, they walked out of the store through the anti-shoplifting portal and its radio pulses confused the code with unexpected lead voltage, suspected a transistor output stage fault, and thus shut down the amps and went into POR, disabling their device on the spot and their Parkinson's Disease symptoms returned immediately in full force with the implant disabled. And it will stay that way until you find one of the mfg's authorized service nurse-practitioners with the specialty hardware to go into diagnostic mode, download the logs, check the amps for self-test and watch it if causes the person to start physically glitching out, and if everything's OK the nurse can send the command to return it to normal operating mode.

But a hack could have bricked that bluetooth service interface, requiring surgical replacement under RMA. Or the bluetooth module firmware could still have malicious code that the service mode didn't see, checked out the device as ok without surgery and re-enabled, but the malware will later try to rewrite the main firmware all over again.

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