CodeMeter pushes the security frontier for medical devices

Wibu-Systems, the company behind the popular CodeMeter protection, licensing, and security technology, is a loyal supporter of the Medica expo. For this year’s edition of the world’s leading medical technology expo, the security specialists from Karlsruhe will be coming to Düsseldorf from 14 to 17 November with lots of news and insights concerning the future of healthcare and medical devices.

For medical professionals, be they practicing doctors, hospital administrators, or medical technology engineers, Medica is a must. Every year, the fair brings more than a hundred thousand visitors to the Düsseldorf expo grounds, populated by thousands of exhibitors from every sector of the medical world. The exhibitor categories range from cutting-edge diagnostics and modern imaging technologies to more routine sellers of hospital equipment, pharmaceuticals, and consumables, medical publishers, or service providers and, of course, medical IT systems and solutions.

Wibu-Systems is a proud technology partner of many innovative medical businesses, both established names in the field and more bijou tech-forward enterprises. As such, Medica has long been an important event on the Wibu-Systems calendar. This year, instead of coming to Düsseldorf with its own booth, the company will send a high-profile team of representatives, friends, and partners who will take an active part in the Tech Forum on 14 November.

Headlining the event, Steffen Zimmermann of the VDMA association will be introducing the perennial VDMA product piracy study, a topic of particular relevance in the medical field, where counterfeit products can have serious consequences for the wellbeing of their users and the commercial fate of entire companies in this investment-heavy and highly competitive business. In his contribution, Wibu-Systems’ co-founder and CEO, Oliver Winzenried, will address a pertinent aspect: The importance of reliable software bills-of-materials and digital product passes for devices that operators and their patients can trust, and the importance of sophisticated licensing solutions to make all of this secure, traceable, and commercially sustainable.

Siemens Healthineers, the other eminent enterprise behind the panel, is represented by Dr. Georg Heidenreich, its Director Healthcare IT Standards. Dr. Heidenreich will take the audience to the new cybersecurity frontier in the medical field: As medical devices have become smarter and more connected, entire new industries of cybercriminals have sprung up, as evidenced by the constant stream of news about ransomware or other cyberattacks on healthcare providers. With entire hospitals brought to a standstill in particularly severe incidents, the industry has had to rethink its approach to regulations, standards, and security in the direction of a more proactive and holistic understanding.

Dr. Carmen Kempka, who heads the corporate technology unit at Wibu-Systems, will then take the discussion to a new level with a look at a topic that has made the leap from the pages of science fiction writers to the real world − Artificial intelligence. As learning algorithms are beginning to take over more and more sophisticated and critical roles in the medical field in particular, cybersecurity has gained new urgency. Hacking, manipulation, or industrial espionage are no longer only a worry for a company’s bottom line; they become a serious threat to the reliability of diagnoses and treatments when artificial intelligence becomes a vital part of imaging, diagnostics, or other parts of the medical landscape.

“AI has the power to massively improve the accuracy of diagnostics”, Dr. Kempka explains. “But when a hacker tampers with the machine learning process of e.g. an AI that checks CT scans in cancer diagnostics, people’s lives are at risk. We at Wibu-Systems are preparing today for the threats of tomorrow, and we will be at Medica to share our insights with our friends and clients in the industry.”