MIT Technology Review August 17, 2018 Researchers at New York University introduced a new defensive technique called chaff bugs. Rather than eliminating bugs, they add large numbers of bugs that are provably (but not obviously) non-exploitable. Attackers who attempt to find and exploit bugs in software will, with high probability, find an intentionally placed non-exploitable bug and waste precious resources in trying to build a working exploit. They developed two strategies for ensuring non-exploitability and use them to automatically add thousands of non-exploitable bugs to real-world software such as nginx and libFLAC; they showed that the functionality of the software […]
Why AI researchers shouldn’t turn their backs on the military
MIT Technology Review August 14, 2018 According to the author of a recent book, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, AI researchers must be a part of thes conversations, as their technical expertise is vital to shaping policy choices. We need to take into account AI bias, transparency, explainability, safety, and other concerns. AI technology has these twin features today—it’s powerful but also has many vulnerabilities, much like computers and cyber risks. Unfortunately, governments seem to have gotten the first part of that message (AI is powerful) but not the second (it comes with risks). AI […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Innovations for the Week of August 17, 2018
01. Magnetic antiparticles offer new horizons for information technologies 02. Liquid battery could lead to flexible energy storage 03. Machine learning technique reconstructs images passing through a multimode fiber 04. Bacteria-fighting polymers created with light 05. Novel approach to coherent control of a three-level quantum system 06. Scientists reduced the weight of optics for satellite observation by 100 times 07. Another step forward on universal quantum computer 08. World’s densest, totally silent solid-state drive 09. Opto-thermoplasmonic patterning of 2D materials 10. Hackers could turn your garden sprinklers into a cyber weapon And others… AI for cybersecurity is a hot new […]
Another step forward on universal quantum computer
Phys.org August 13, 2018 Researchers in Japan have demonstrated non-adiabatic and non-abelian holonomic quantum gates over a geometric spin qubit on an electron or nitrogen nucleus, which paves the way to realizing a universal quantum computer. To avoid unwanted interference, they used a degenerate subspace of the triplet spin qutrit to form an ideal logical qubit in an NV center. This method facilitated fast and precise geometric gates at a temperature below 10 K, and the gate fidelity was limited by radiative relaxation. Based on this method, in combination with polarized microwaves, they succeeded in the manipulation of the geometric […]
Hackers could turn your garden sprinklers into a cyber weapon
MIT Technology Review August 8, 2018 The researchers in Israel found security weaknesses in popular commercial irrigation systems that could allow hackers to turn them on and off remotely. Large numbers of zombie sprinklers could be linked in a “botnet” that rapidly drains a city’s water reserves. The researchers claim a botnet of 1,350-odd sprinklers could empty an urban water tower in an hour, and around 24,000 could empty a flood water reservoir overnight. The researchers have notified manufacturers of the flaws they found in the software controlling the sprinklers… read more.
AI for cybersecurity is a hot new thing—and a dangerous gamble
MIT Technology Review August 11, 2018 Many firms are now rolling out machine-learning-based products to get an audience with customers who have bought into the AI hype cycle. According to experts many products being rolled out involve supervised learning. The training information they use has not been thoroughly scrubbed of anomalous data points which could lead to the algorithm missing some attacks. Other concerns include difficulty of figuring out why some very complex algorithms spit out certain answers and overreliance on a single, master algorithm to drive a security system. Experts emphasize the importance of monitoring and minimizing the risks… […]
Bacteria-fighting polymers created with light
Phys.org August 14, 2018 Researchers in the UK have developed a way to synthesize large libraries of polymers to make screening for antimicrobial activity faster, and without the need to use sealed vials. By using multiple ‘building blocks’ in their polymers, new antimicrobials were identified – some of which appear to inhibit bacteria growth, contrary to predictions. They found that the best materials do not seem to break apart the bacteria as we predicted, but rather inhibit their growth. The benefit of the method is that it allows screening of hundreds of different structures, enabling the researchers to ‘go fishing’ […]
Internet of Drones (IoD): Threats, Vulnerability, and Security Perspectives
Arxiv August 1, 2018 According to the researchers in South Korea IoD can enhance the state-of-the-art for drones while leveraging services from the existing cellular networks. However, it is vulnerable to malicious attacks over open-air radio space. Due to increasing threats and attacks, there has been a lot of attention on deploying security measures for IoD networks. In this paper, critical threats and vulnerabilities of IoD are presented, taxonomy is created to classify attacks based on the threats and vulnerabilities associated with the networking of drone and their incorporation in the existing cellular setups. It summarizes the challenges and research […]
Liquid battery could lead to flexible energy storage
Phys.org August 14, 2018 Researchers in the UK have developed a ‘hybrid-electric-hydrogen’ flow battery, based upon the design of a nanoscale battery that can store energy, releasing the power on demand as electric power or hydrogen gas that can be used as fuel. When a concentrated liquid containing the nano-molecules is made, the amount of energy it can store increases by almost 10 times. Electric cars could be charged in seconds, as the material is a pumpable liquid. This could mean that the battery of an electric car could be “recharged” in roughly the same length of time as petrol […]
Machine learning technique reconstructs images passing through a multimode fiber
Science Daily August 9, 2018 Researchers in Switzerland used deep neural networks (DNNs) to classify and reconstruct the input images from the intensity of the speckle patterns that result after the inputs are propagated through multimode fiber. They demonstrated this result for fibers up to 1 km long by training the DNNs with a database of 16,000 handwritten digits. Better recognition accuracy was obtained when the DNNs were trained to first reconstruct the input and then classify based on the recovered image. They reported remarkable robustness against environmental instabilities and tolerance to deviations of the input pattern from the patterns […]