This year’s MRMCD16 had a topic that immediately
let me submit a talk about medical device security: “diagnosis:critical”. Or to
quote the official website:
Security issues in soft- and hardware have a low chance of healing, especially
in medical IT.
Despite years of therapy using code reviews and programming guidelines, we still
face huge amounts of vulnerable software that probably is in need of palliative
treatment.
Security vulnerabilities caused by the invasion of IT in the medical sector are
becoming real threats. From insulin pumps over analgesic pumps through to pace
makers, more and more medical devices have been hacked already. This year’s
motto “mrmcd2016 - diagnosis:critical” stands summarizing for the current state
of the whole IT sector.
On Saturday last week I had the pleasure of delivering a
workshop on IPv6 networking
at the MRMCD2015 conference in Darmstadt, Germany. It goes
without saying that the atmosphere was quite amicable; as usual at CCC-related
events. What definitely impressed me the most was the diversity of the audience.
There were around thirty attendees representing several age groups and all with
seemingly differing backgrounds.
The engagement of everyone was stunning. I questioned the most engaged attendees
relentlessly and they fired back. I was being constantly bombarded with
questions from enthusiastic geeks and they got, hopefully, what they deserved.
This provided for a great learning environment, a friendly atmosphere and in my
humble opinion really constructive dialogues. Well, one has to be interested and
enthusiastic in order to spend three hours on a rainy Saturday evening
discussing IPv6.