Researchers achieve quantum key distribution for cybersecurity in novel experiment

Phys.org   March 13, 2024 In their conference paper researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory reported on the first implementation of their CV-QKD scheme over a deployed optical fiber network. According to the researchers, in continuous variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD), using a truly local (not transmitted over the network) oscillator improves security… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE 

Researchers use liquid crystals that mimic beetle shell coloration units to create a more secure type of QR code

Phys.org  July 14, 2023 Cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) are becoming increasingly popular due to their unique chiral structural color. Unlike ordinary CLCs materials, CLCs particles exhibit angle-independence, making them particularly noteworthy. However, currently, there are limited effective methods for controlling the structural color of CLCs particles, other than adjusting the concentration of chiral dopants or introducing stimuli-responsive groups. Researchers in Japan have developed a scalable and cost-effective process for preparing monodisperse CLCs particles via dispersion polymerization. By making CLCs into micrometer-sized monodisperse spheres, the helical pitch of CLCs could be varied according to its particle size, and the resulting structural […]

Researchers demonstrate secure information transfer using spatial correlations in quantum entangled beams of light

Phys.org  June 5, 2023 The ability to use the temporal and spatial degrees of freedom of quantum states of light to encode and transmit information is crucial for a robust and efficient quantum network. However, the potential offered by the large dimensionality of the spatial degree of freedom remains unfulfilled, as the necessary level of control required to encode information remains elusive. Researchers at the University of Oklahoma encoded information in the distribution of the spatial correlations of entangled twin beams by taking advantage of their dependence on the angular spectrum of the pump needed for four-wave mixing. They showed […]

Thinking like a cyber-attacker to protect user data

MIT News  August 11, 2022 A team of researchers in the US (MIT, University of Illinois, Texas Advanced Computing Center) found that a component of computer processors that connects different parts of the chip can be exploited by malicious agents who seek to steal secret information from programs running on the computer. They reverse-engineered the on-chip interconnect and developed two non-invasive mitigation mechanisms to interconnect side-channel attacks and offer insights to guide the design of future defenses. By reverse engineering the mesh interconnect revealed, for the first time, the precise conditions under which it is susceptible to contention. They showed […]

Disrupting Exploitable Patterns in Software to Make Systems Safer

DARPA News  September 22, 2021 The Hardening Development Toolchains Against Emergent Execution Engines (HARDEN) program seeks to give developers a way to explore novel theories and approaches and develop practical tools to anticipate, isolate, and mitigate emergent behaviors in computing systems throughout the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). The program aims to create mitigation approaches that go well beyond patching. It will also focus on validating the generated approaches by applying broad theories and generic tools to concrete technological use cases of general-purpose integrated software systems…read more. More information on the program

Shadow figment technology foils cyberattacks

Science Daily  June 2, 2021 Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have created a cybersecurity technology called Shadow Figment which uses artificial intelligence to deploy elaborate deception to keep attackers engaged in a pretend world — the figment — that mirrors the real world. The decoy interacts with users in real time, responding in realistic ways to commands. It rewards hackers with false signals of success, keeping them occupied while defenders learn about the attackers’ methods and take actions to protect the real system. The credibility of the deception relies on a machine learning program that learns from observing […]

UVA engineering computer scientists discover new vulnerability affecting computers globally

EurekAlert  April 30, 2021 In 2018, industry and academic researchers revealed a potentially devastating hardware flaw, they called Spectre, which was built into modern computer processors that get their speed from a technique called “speculative execution”. 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. Researchers at the University of Virginia has uncovered a line of attack that breaks all Spectre defenses, meaning that billions of computers and other devices across the globe […]

Scientists harness chaos to protect devices from hackers

Techxplore.org  April 7, 2021 A team of researchers in the US (Ohio State University, industry) created a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) based on an ultra-fast chaotic network known as a Hybrid Boolean Network (HBN) implemented on a field programmable gate array. PUFs take advantage of tiny manufacturing variations sometimes seen only at the atomic level and used them to create unique sequences of 0s and 1s that researchers in the field call “secrets”. Unlike the current PUFs, the new PUFs have 1077 secrets. They created a complex network in their PUFs using a web of randomly interconnected logic gates that […]

Darpa Hacks Its Secure Hardware, Fends Off Most Attacks

IEEE Spectrum  February 16. 2021 Last summer, Darpa asked hackers to take their best shots at a set of newly designed hardware architectures designed under the DARPA System Security Integration Through Hardware and Firmware https://www.darpa.mil/program/ssith (SSITH) program. After 13,000 hours of hacking by 580 cybersecurity researchers only 10 vulnerabilities were found. Seven of the 10 vulnerabilities were deemed critical, according to the Common Vulnerability Scoring System 3.0 standards. Most of those resulted from weaknesses introduced by interactions between the hardware, firmware, and the operating system software…read more.

New transistor design disguises key computer chip hardware from hackers

TechXplore.com  December 7, 2020 When a voltage is applied an N type and a P type transistors perform computations. Right tools could clearly identify them—allowing you to go backwards, find out what each individual circuit component is doing and then reproduce the chip. A team of researchers in the US (Purdue University, University of Notre Dame) has shown that high-performance, low-voltage, two-dimensional black phosphorus FETs that have reconfigurable polarities are suitable for hardware security applications. Black phosphorus is so thin that it would enable electron and hole transport at a similar current level, making the two types of transistors appear […]