Novel transmitter protects wireless devices from hackers

Eurekalert  June 7, 2018 Researchers at MIT have developed an ultrafast frequency hopping transmitter that frequency hops every microsecond and a protocol to support the ultrafast frequency hopping. The transmitter leverages BAW resonators and rapidly switches between a wide range of RF channel. They replaced a crystal oscillator with an oscillator based on a BAW resonator and incorporated components that divide an input frequency into multiple frequencies creating a host of new radio frequencies that can span about 80 channels. Their work will be presented at the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium… read more.

Here’s How Spies Can Use Your Phone to Find You And Eavesdrop With Ease

Science Alert  June 01, 2018 The SS7 (Signaling System 7) created in the 1970s as a way for telecommunications carriers to exchange information as they routed calls, has little security, allowing intelligence agencies and some criminal gangs to spy on unwitting targets – based on nothing more than their cellphone numbers. As the number of companies with access to SS7 grew to many thousands, the lack of built-in security became a growing problem. It was easy for anyone with access to the network to pretend to be a carrier making legitimate requests for information about customers. According to an Israeli […]

The Unhackable Envelope

IEEE Spectrum   May 3, 2018 Researchers in Germany have developed an envelope called B-Trepid to protect high-security computer. It replaces the stored key with one that is generated by the structure of the envelope itself. Instead of relying on resistances in the envelope’s mesh, B-Trepid calculates the capacitances between the mesh’s wires which vary from envelope to envelope in unpredictable ways. When B-Trepid is attached to its computer network and turned on, the external mesh generates a unique key that is used to encrypt all the data within the system. When it’s off, there’s no key and therefore nothing to […]

Robot designed to defend factories against cyberthreats

Phys.org  April 3, 2018 Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology developed HoneyBot designed to lure in digital troublemakers and trick the bad actors into giving up valuable information to cybersecurity professionals. The gadget can be monitored and controlled through the internet. But unlike other remote-controlled robots, the HoneyBot’s special ability is tricking its operators into thinking it is performing one task, when it is doing something completely different. Rather than allowing the hacker to then run amok in the physical world, the robot could be designed to follow certain commands deemed harmless but stopping short of doing anything dangerous…read more.

The “Black Mirror” scenarios that are leading some experts to call for more secrecy on AI

MIT Technology Review  February 21, 2018 A report, “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation” authored by a team of more than 20 researchers in the UK, warns that AI creates new opportunities for criminals, political operatives, and oppressive governments—so much so that some AI research may need to be kept secret. The report includes four dystopian vignettes involving artificial intelligence to illustrate just a handful of the risks – the smarter phishing scam, the malware epidemic, the robot assassin, and a bigger Big Brother. It recommends more research and debate on the risks of AI and […]

Cyberwarfare is taking to the skies, aboard drones

MIT Technology Review  February 6, 2018 Hovering computers will make it increasingly possible to hack equipment that doesn’t connect directly to the internet. While it’s not straightforward, hovering a drone close to a vehicle or building could enable people to hack devices that use wireless communication but were once thought relatively safe. Cyberscoop rounded up a selection of drones that hack into networks… read more

Energy-efficient encryption for the internet of things

MIT News  February 12, 2018 Researchers at MIT have built a general-purpose elliptic-curve chip, hardwired to perform public-key encryption, that consumes only 1/400 as much power as software execution of the same protocols would. It also uses about 1/10 as much memory and executes 500 times faster. They will present their paper at the upcoming International Solid-State Circuits Conference… read more.

A fast-evolving new botnet could take gadgets in your home to the dark side

MIT Technology Review  January 31, 2018 Since December, security researchers have been tracking a malware called Satori, which hijacks internet-connected devices and turns them into “zombies” that can be remotely controlled in unison. After finding a weak point in a device’s defenses, Satori probes to see if the owner has kept default passwords and settings, hoping to exploit these to gain control of the machine. If it succeeds, it then looks for other devices on a network and tries to infect them too. Some of Satori’s source code appear to be the same as that of Mirai, a botnet that […]

Forget viruses or spyware—your biggest cyberthreat is greedy currency miners

MIT Technology Review  January 19, 2018 The cybersecurity firm Check Point published its regular Global Threat Index which shows that Coinhive, a piece of software that uses processing power on someone’s device to mine cryptocurrency, has become the most prevalent form of malware on the Internet. Another piece of cryptojacking malware, called Cryptoloot, is now the third most prevalent. A regular antivirus product should help many people identify and remove rogue mining software from their computers. But more sophisticated examples of cryptomining software installed on servers and websites that some rule-based threat detection tools wouldn’t spot… read more.  

Developing a secure, un-hackable net

Physorg  January 11, 2018 A method of securely communicating between multiple quantum devices developed by researchers in the UK does not rely on assumptions, but instead it uses the quantum laws of physics to ensure security, which would need to be broken to hack the encryption. They report on a way of communicating securely between three or more quantum devices, irrespective of who built them. The method works by using the network’s structure to limit what an eavesdropper can learn. They used machine learning and causal inference to develop the test for the un-hackable communications system. This approach distributes secret […]