Tag Archive for: Scientists

Scientists send data wirelessly using nuclear radiation • The Register

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Boffins from the UK’s Lancaster University and the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia have transmitted and received data wirelessly using nuclear radiation.

The Register assumes that readers understand that the wireless tech used in phone networks, WiFi, Bluetooth, TV transmissions and the like employ electromagnetic radiation, which is rather safer and less controversial than nuclear radiation.

But in a study titled Wireless information transfer with fast neutrons, scientists and engineers used nuclear radiation emitted by Californium-252 instead.

“Several examples of pertinent information, i.e., a word, the alphabet and a random number selected blindly, have been encoded serially into the modulation of the neutron field,” the paper states.

The boffins did so because “Fast neutrons propagate significant distances and interact with materials in ways that are complementary to those of electromagnetic radiation. However, their consideration as a potential means of wireless communication has been limited to date despite this complementarity with the electromagnetic medium of choice for both near-and far-field communication systems.”

Fast neutrons have been left to their own devices – or should that be left out of devices – because sources of fast neutrons are “highly regulated for reasons of security and exposure risk”. That risk comes from the fact they can penetrate most matter and do very nasty things to the human body.

But the authors of the paper have spotted a research paper titled Novel Surface-Mounted Neutron Generator that describes a “pulsed neutron generator packaged in a flat computer chip shape”. That invention, the authors write, “suggests the prospect of integrating sources of neutrons into intelligent systems which could, hypothetically, design out issues of security and risk”.

Their research doesn’t directly address the risk issues associated with fast neutrons, but does find they can carry…

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Computer scientists discover new vulnerability affecting computers globally — ScienceDaily

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In 2018, industry and academic researchers revealed a potentially devastating hardware flaw that made computers and other devices worldwide vulnerable to attack.

Researchers named the vulnerability Spectre because the flaw was built into modern computer processors that get their speed from a technique called “speculative execution,” in which the processor predicts instructions it might end up executing and preps by following the predicted path to pull the instructions from memory. A Spectre attack tricks the processor into executing instructions along the wrong path. Even though the processor recovers and correctly completes its task, hackers can access confidential data while the processor is heading the wrong way.

Since Spectre was discovered, the world’s most talented computer scientists from industry and academia have worked on software patches and hardware defenses, confident they’ve been able to protect the most vulnerable points in the speculative execution process without slowing down computing speeds too much.

They will have to go back to the drawing board.

A team of University of Virginia School of Engineering computer science researchers has uncovered a line of attack that breaks all Spectre defenses, meaning that billions of computers and other devices across the globe are just as vulnerable today as they were when Spectre was first announced. The team reported its discovery to international chip makers in April and will present the new challenge at a worldwide computing architecture conference in June.

The researchers, led by Ashish Venkat, William Wulf Career Enhancement Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UVA Engineering, found a whole new way for hackers to exploit something called a “micro-op cache,” which speeds up computing by storing simple commands and allowing the processor to fetch them quickly and early in the speculative execution process. Micro-op caches have been built into Intel computers manufactured since 2011.

Venkat’s team discovered that hackers can steal data when a processor fetches commands from the micro-op cache.

“Think about a hypothetical airport security scenario where TSA lets you in without checking your…

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Scientists harness chaos to protect devices from hackers

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hacker
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Researchers have found a way to use chaos to help develop digital fingerprints for electronic devices that may be unique enough to foil even the most sophisticated hackers.

Just how unique are these fingerprints? The researchers believe it would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to test for every possible combination available.

“In our system, chaos is very, very good,” said Daniel Gauthier, senior author of the study and professor of physics at The Ohio State University.

The study was recently published online in the journal IEEE Access.

The researchers created a new version of an emerging technology called physically unclonable functions, or PUFs, that are built into computer chips.

Gauthier said these new PUFs could potentially be used to create secure ID cards, to track goods in supply chains and as part of authentication applications, where it is vital to know that you’re not communicating with an impostor.

“The SolarWinds hack that targeted the U.S. government really got people thinking about how we’re going to be doing authentication and cryptography,” Gauthier said.

“We’re hopeful that this could be part of the solution.”

The new solution makes use of PUFs, which take advantage of tiny manufacturing variations found in each computer chip—variations so small that they aren’t noticeable to the end user, said Noeloikeau Charlot, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in physics at Ohio State.

“There’s a wealth of information in even the smallest differences found on computers chips that we can exploit to create PUFs,” Charlot said.

These slight variations—sometimes seen only at the atomic level—are used to create unique sequences of 0s and 1s that researchers in the field call, appropriately enough, “secrets.”

Other groups have developed what they thought were strong PUFs, but research showed that hackers could successfully attack them. The problem is that current PUFs contain only a limited number of secrets, Gauthier said.

“If you have a…

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Security flaw could allow hackers to trick lab scientists into making viruses

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Cyber-security researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev recently discovered a computer attack that could allow hackers to remotely trick laboratory scientists into creating toxins and viruses.

The setup: Medical professionals use synthetic DNA for a variety of reasons, including the development of immunogens for creating vaccines. The Ben-Gurion researchers developed and tested an end-to-end attack that changes data on a bioengineer’s computer in order to replace short DNA sub-strings with malicious code.

If terrorists wanted to to spread a virus or toxin by hijacking a reputable lab or hiding it inside of a vaccine or other medical treatment, they’d traditionally need physical access to the laboratory or part of its supply chain. According to this paper published last week in Nature Biotechnology that’s no longer the case.

The researchers claim that a simple trojan horse and a bit of hidden code could turn medicine into malice and the engineers creating the tainted goods would be none the wiser:

A cyberattack intervening with synthetic DNA orders could lead to the synthesis of nucleic acids encoding parts of pathogenic organisms or harmful proteins and toxin … This threat is real. We conducted a proof of concept: an obfuscated DNA encoding a toxic peptide was not detected by software implementing the screening guidelines. The respective order was moved to production.

The researchers describe a scenario wherein a bad actor uses a Trojan horse to infect a researcher’s computer. When that researcher goes to order synthetic DNA, the malware obfuscates the order so that it looks legit to the security software the DNA shop uses to check it. In reality, the obfuscated DNA sub-strings are harmful.

The DNA shop fills the order (unknowingly sending the researcher the dangerous DNA) and the researcher’s security software fails to uncover the obfuscated sub-strings so the researcher remains clueless.

The researchers managed to use their technique to successfully bypass security for 16 out of the 50 orders they tried it on.

Credit: Nature

What this means: We’re in a dangerous inbetween…

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