You think you have enough to worry about keeping your computer from being remotely broken into? Imagine if you were implanted with a pacemaker and you find out someone could wirelessly hack into it to make dangerous changes or worse yet, turn it off.
Often implanted medical devices need to be configured or adjusted at a doctor’s office using a wireless reader to gain access. Unfortunately, these same radios signals could be amplified to give far away hackers an entry point into those same machines. Thankfully researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control have come up with a security plan in which medical devices will use ultrasound to prevent hacking.
Because ultrasound can gauge distances between objects more accurately, the combination of ultrasound with radio signals will make these devices more secure. In essence, the use of both signals ensure that if medical personnel needs to configure a device like a pacemaker, the device knows the difference between someone using a wireless reader that is close to the patient and someone trying to gain access down the street.