January 25, 2016
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is launching a project to improve the cybersecurity of wireless infusion pumps.
To do so, NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) is looking for vendors to provide it with the components and technical expertise required to simulate the hospital environment in which infusion pumps operate.
In a notice published in the Federal Register Monday, NIST said the goal of the project is to help health providers secure wireless infusion pumps on an enterprise network.
The project will look at the lifecycle of an infusion pump in a hospital setting, from procurement to decommissioning, as well as the types of infrastructure that interacts with the pumps, including the pump server, wireless networks and a hospital’s biomedical engineering department.
IST says its call for participants is only the start “of a process that will identify research participants and components of a laboratory environment to identify, evaluate, and test relevant security tools and controls,” according to a white paper published alongside the notice.