[dlnovell]

I worked for Hospira last year on the Plum A+ and 360 infusion pumps but not the PCA. I'm a little surprised such a blatant security hole wasn't caught, considering the magnitude of the regulatory environment we worked under. I'd never worked in that kind of environment before, and I left shortly after a successfully defended audit of our software development and tracking process and systems. (Although how successful is the development and tracking process if a year later this "bug" comes out?) My guess is that because we were beaten over the head day in and day out focusing on "if this software delivers the wrong medication the patient is probably going to die", and "if you make a mistake in the development process and in change tracking we can lose the ability to make these devices" that the idea of defending against malicious intent was de-emphasized/overlooked.

[voidlogic]

Question unrelated to the stupidity of supporting telnet as protocol on these devices- Did you guys use formal verification techniques? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification

[jwiley]

Formal verification would not help if the formal or informal design specs called for unauthenticated telnet. It would prove that the entire stack was bullet-proof against memory violations and mathematically pure, and that it would with 100% certainty allow untrusted users to access administrative functions.

[voidlogic]

If some one would explain the down-voting to me, I'd love to understand... honestly

1. My question was unrelated to the poor decision the OPs former employer made to use telnet.

2. Formal verification the the gold standard in correctness often used for can't fail things like missiles and satellites.

[lifeisstillgood]

This is most likely the problem - the number of cases where patients die from drug delivery mistakes is probably in thousands if not tens of thousands. The cases where someone deliberately administers a dose, via a machine are likely to be zero (because I have not heard of them)

So any cost benefit or risk analysis is going to worry about the drug.

[Nitramp]

If you require certification of software by some standard, companies will build software that passes the certification standard.

But in my experience, the assumption that a security, quality, or whatever certification process correlates with actually secure, high quality, etc software does not have a lot backing it.

There's a big difference between dotting the i's and crossing the t's according to ISO-9001, and actually caring about software quality, and it seems like the standards make it harder to actually care and actually focus on delivering a good product.

[mryan]

It sounds similar to the idea of teachers "teaching to the test", as opposed to providing an all round education and critical thinking ability.