MIT uses ‘frequency hopping’ to keep hackers away from IoT devices

Smart medical devices such as insulin pumps and pacemakers, wearables, connected cars and smart home devices are growing in popularity – and collecting a lot of user information. This is a problem mostly because IoT devices currently on the market are very vulnerable, lacking even the most basic encryption. You’d think manufacturers working on smart toys or medical devices would be more responsible, but even these types of gadgets have numerous vulnerabilities that expose users to threats.

MIT comes to the rescue of billions of vulnerable IoT devices. The institution has just announced another breakthrough solution, this time to keep hackers away from connected devices and protect the data they store. Researchers have been working on a wireless transmitter that uses data encryption and frequency hopping, a technology Hedy Lamarr explored a long time ago.

“MIT researchers have developed a novel transmitter that frequency hops each individual 1 or 0 bit of a data packet, every microsecond, which is fast enough to thwart even the quickest hackers,” writes MIT News, while the original technology made the process slower and it couldn’t fend off attacks. The technology uses various radio frequency channels to keep hackers from hijacking and manipulating data packets.

“With the current existing [transmitter] architecture, you wouldn’t be able to hop data bits at that speed with low power,” says Rabia Tugce Yazicigil, first author on a paper describing the technology. “By developing this protocol and radio frequency architecture together, we offer physical-layer security for connectivity of everything.”

“More seriously, perhaps, the transmitter could help secure medical devices, such as insulin pumps and pacemakers, that could be attacked if a hacker wants to harm someone,” Yazicigil says. “When people start corrupting the messages [of these devices] it starts affecting people’s lives.”