How much foresight must engineers have? At what point do threats become absurdly remote? The questions arise, as I look at an item that recently crossed my desk. It provides a view into a future in which application security will endlessly enter uncharted regions. It has to do with hacking pacemakers via radio.

“Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: Software Radio Attacks and Zero-Power Defenses” describes a study that University of Washington and University of Massachusetts researchers undertook to measure the security and privacy properties of implantable defibrillators that support radio-based reprogramming. Read more on SearchSoftwareQuality.com.

Read Application threats seen to radio programmable pacemakers.