Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio mention in DEFCON subway presentation

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Tue, 12 Aug 2008, Dan Halperin wrote:
> On Aug 11, 2008, at 4:58 PM, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> > On Mon, 11 Aug 2008, Philip Balister wrote:
> >> New appication for USRP+GNU radio, free subway rides :)
> >>
> >> http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf
> >>
> >> Well, at least until people learn to deploy secure systems.
> >
> > There's also..
> > http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/08/defcon-excuse-me-while-i-turn-off
> >-your-pacemaker/
> >
> > A bit more scary :(
>
> Please please please don't be scared by this. Yet :). We believe that
> the risk to patients with today's technology is basically nil. Our
> attacks took tens of seconds to minutes and required very close
> range. From there it's much easier just to punch you.

Well, I don't have a pacemaker so punching would be your only method ;)

The range issue could be 'improved' with a better antenna though, right?

> The sentence that the article misquotes was closer to "With today's
> hardware, these attacks are mostly academic. We need to develop
> effective security solutions now before these types of attacks become
> easier to mount."
>
> If I needed a pacemaker/cardiac defibrillator, I would get one
> without hesitation -- including the model we investigated.

Maybe you could start wearing chainmail ;)

It certainly looks like it was an interesting project :)

Do you have a paper on it? I had a google but the top hits are "ZOMG 
HACKERS WILL KILL US ALL" :-/

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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