Disclaimer: I may not be the first person to come up with this idea
What if for dangerous medications (such as 2-4 dinitrophenol (dnp) possibly?) the medication was stored in a device that would only dispense a dose when it received a time-dependent cryptographic key generated by a trusted source at a supervised location (the pharmaceutical company/some government agency/an independent security company)?
If the dispensing device is “locked” against the user and you want to enforce dosing you don’t need any crypto keys. Just make the device have an internal clock and dispense a dose every X hours.
In the general case, the device is externally controlled and then people who have control can do whatever they want with it. I’m still not seeing a particular need for a crypto key.
Just make the device have an internal clock and dispense a dose every X hours.
Forever? What if you want to change the dosage.
I’m still not seeing a particular need for a crypto key.
So that only the person who’s supposed to control it can control it. You don’t want someone altering it with their laptop just because they have bluetooth.
Edit:
Somehow I was thinking of implanting something that dispensed drugs. Just dispensing pills would make most of that pointless. Why worry about someone breaking it with a laptop if they can break it with a hammer? I suppose it might work if you somehow build the thing like a safe.
There are already dispensing machines that dispense doses on a timer. They are mostly targeted at people who need reminding (e.g. Alzheimers), though, rather than people who may want to take too much. I don’t think the cryptographic security would be the problem in that scenario, but the physical security of the device. You would need some trusted way to reload it and it would have to be very difficult to open even though it would presumably just be sitting on your table at home, which is a very high bar. It could possibly be combined with always-on tampering reporting and legal threats to make the idea of tampering with it less appealing though.
Disclaimer: I may not be the first person to come up with this idea
What if for dangerous medications (such as 2-4 dinitrophenol (dnp) possibly?) the medication was stored in a device that would only dispense a dose when it received a time-dependent cryptographic key generated by a trusted source at a supervised location (the pharmaceutical company/some government agency/an independent security company)?
Could this be useful to prevent overdoses?
If the dispensing device is “locked” against the user and you want to enforce dosing you don’t need any crypto keys. Just make the device have an internal clock and dispense a dose every X hours.
In the general case, the device is externally controlled and then people who have control can do whatever they want with it. I’m still not seeing a particular need for a crypto key.
Forever? What if you want to change the dosage.
So that only the person who’s supposed to control it can control it. You don’t want someone altering it with their laptop just because they have bluetooth.
Edit:
Somehow I was thinking of implanting something that dispensed drugs. Just dispensing pills would make most of that pointless. Why worry about someone breaking it with a laptop if they can break it with a hammer? I suppose it might work if you somehow build the thing like a safe.
There are already dispensing machines that dispense doses on a timer. They are mostly targeted at people who need reminding (e.g. Alzheimers), though, rather than people who may want to take too much. I don’t think the cryptographic security would be the problem in that scenario, but the physical security of the device. You would need some trusted way to reload it and it would have to be very difficult to open even though it would presumably just be sitting on your table at home, which is a very high bar. It could possibly be combined with always-on tampering reporting and legal threats to make the idea of tampering with it less appealing though.