Interoperable Telesurgery Protocol Plaintext Unauthenticated MitM Hijacking

[andrewstuart2]

So, run it over a VPN.

I'm not saying that they shouldn't add security to their protocol, but I can think of several ways off the top of my head to stay secure. The application-layer protocol doesn't have to be the one to implement it, network-level encapsulation can help you there.

I'm not sure how old the protocol is, but perhaps it was more important to get it working and wrap it in a VPN and then iterate on that design.

[maffydub]

Agreed.

It looks as though the researchers saw that as a possibility too:

"It is possible to temporarily mitigate the flaw by implementing the following workaround: Researchers have demonstrated that ITP can be operated over TLS/DTLS, using certificate-based authentication to ensure the security and integrity of the protocol."

I don't really understand why this is only a "temporary mitigation", though, rather than a reasonable long-term solution. Can anyone enlighten me?

Maybe the extra technical complexity of setting up these certificates is deemed too great, and the likelihood of people getting it wrong too high?

[athenot]

VPN may sound archaic to those outside of health, but there are quite a few intra- and inter-hospital links that rely on VPN. Even with hospital SaaS vendors, it's not uncommon.

It's not like surgery robots move around the network and come online at unexpected locations. Those installations are planned ahead and the IT considerations are part of that deployment. Also, encryption is important but so is available bandwidth and bandwidth quality: a jittery link could be as dangerous as a compromised one.

[higherpurpose]

The same VPNs that use weak DHE crypto?

https://weakdh.org/

[virgil_disgr4ce]

Did some digging on this. Basically: 1) Some researchers wrote a paper called "Preliminary protocol for interoperable telesurgery" in 2009. (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.160...) 2) At the end of the paper, they write: "Also, security is an obvious requirement for real world adoption of this kind of service." 3) Last month, some other people showed that you could hax0r this unprotected protocol: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/537001/security-experts...

So in other words, somebody demonstrated that a preliminary protocol that admitted it didn't have any security was insecure. Woo!

[tedunangst]

> And video encryption probably isn’t practical over the kind of network links envisaged for remote surgery in extreme locations. That may not be a security concern but it does raise important issues of privacy.

That's a curious statement. How does encrypting video increase its bandwidth requirements?

[DyslexicAtheist]

I access the site and get:

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have I gone back in time to 1995?

[lotsofcows]

Authentication and encryption are hard problems. They're also solved problems (for some definition of solved). Like any other protocol, it should concentrate on solving its own problem well and leave unrelated problems to others.

[araes]

Make a great major news story. I can think of almost nothing more terrifying than being naked on a table with some random haxxor operating a rogue telesugery robot over me. Makes even normal surgery sound good.

[frozenport]

There is nothibg wrong with text, some of the intended uses of the protocol are over rs232.

[jameskozart]

wow, too lame