Researchers develop phase-change key for new hardware security

Nanowerk  November 18, 2022 An international team of researchers (Singapore, UK, South Korea) has developed a new type of hardware security device called physical unclonable function (PUF) using phase-change materials. They fabricated devices switch reversibly between the glassy amorphous state and crystal orderly state. Then they used the variation in the device’s electrical conductance to construct the PUF due to the inherent randomness arising from the manufacturing process, which is not shown by conventional silicon-based devices. They modelled the characteristics of actual phase-change devices to generate a simulation of many phase-change-based PUFs and tested their security using machine learning. They […]

A device-independent protocol for more efficient random number generation

Phys.org March 9, 2021 With the growing availability of experimental loophole-free Bell tests it has become possible to implement a new class of device-independent random number generators whose output can be certified to be uniformly random without requiring a detailed model of the quantum devices used. However, all these experiments require many input bits to certify a small number of output bits, and it is an outstanding challenge to develop a system that generates more randomness than is consumes. An international team of researchers (USA -University of Colorado, NIST, University of Maryland, Spain, Japan) developed a device-independent spot-checking protocol that […]

New cyberattack can trick scientists into making toxins or viruses — Ben-Gurion University researchers

EurekAlert  November 30, 2020 According to the researchers in Israel a malware could easily replace a short sub-string of the DNA on a bioengineer’s computer so that they unintentionally create a toxin producing sequence. To regulate both intentional and unintentional generation of dangerous substances, most synthetic gene providers screen DNA orders which is currently the most effective line of defense against such attacks. Unfortunately, the screening guidelines have not been adapted to reflect recent developments in synthetic biology and cyberwarfare. Screening protocols can be circumvented using a generic obfuscation procedure which makes it difficult for the screening software to detect […]

Image cloaking tool thwarts facial recognition programs

TechXplore  August 5, 2020 To help individuals inoculate their images against unauthorized facial recognition models, researchers at the University of Chicago have developed a system called Fawkes. It helps individuals add imperceptible pixel-level changes (they call “cloaks”) to their own photos before releasing them. When used to train facial recognition models, the “cloaked” images produce functional models that consistently cause normal images of the user to be misidentified. In experiments Fawkes provided 95+% protection against user recognition regardless of how trackers train their models. They have shown that Fawkes is robust against a variety of countermeasures that try to detect […]

Adding noise for completely secure communication

Science Daily  June 11, 2020 Device-independent quantum key distribution provides security even when the equipment used to communicate over the quantum channel is largely uncharacterized. A central obstacle in photonic implementations is that the global detection efficiency, i.e., the probability that the signals sent over the quantum channel are successfully received, must be above a certain threshold. Researchers in Switzerland developed a protocol that adds artificial noise, which cannot be known or controlled by an adversary, to the initial measurement data (the raw key). Focusing on a realistic photonic setup using a source based on spontaneous parametric down conversion, they […]

Sneakier and More Sophisticated Malware Is On the Loose

IEEE Spectrum  May 18, 2020 To understand how Android malware has evolved over time, an international team of researchers (US, USA – Boston University) analyzed over 1.2 million malware samples that belonged to 1.28K families over a period of eight years (from 2010 to 2017). The analysis framework relied on collective repositories and recent advances on the systematization of intelligence extracted from multiple anti-virus vendors using differential analysis to isolate software components that are irrelevant to the campaign and studied the behavior of malicious riders alone. They found that since its infancy in 2010, the Android malware ecosystem has changed […]

China’s Quantum Satellite Security Has Been Broken

Next Big Future  August 22, 2019 Although quantum key distribution (QKD) security can theoretically be unbreakable, the actual implementations are not perfect and have been broken. In a spree of publications thereafter, an international team of researchers (Norway, Germany) has now demonstrated several methods to successfully eavesdrop on commercial QKD systems based on weaknesses of avalanche photodiodes operating in gated mode. This has sparked research on new approaches to securing communications networks…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE

New technique uses power anomalies to ID malware in embedded systems

Eurekalert  April 25, 2019 Micro-Architectural attacks have recently come to prominence since they break all existing software-isolation based security by hammering memory rows to gain root privileges or by abusing speculative execution and shared hardware to leak secret data. Researchers at North Carolina State University use anomalies in an embedded system’s power trace to detect evasive micro-architectural attacks. To this end, they introduced power-mimicking micro-architectural attacks to study their evasiveness. They showed that rowhammer attacks cannot evade detection while covert channel and speculation-driven attacks can evade detection. The detector can be embedded into programmable batteries. They have shown that power-anomalies […]

Signals from distant lightning could help secure electric substations

Science Daily  February 26, 2019 To monitor the power grid substation activities researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a radio frequency-based distributed intrusion detection system (RFDIDS) that utilizes a radio receiver as a diagnostic tool to provide air-gapped, independent, and verifiable information about the radio emissions from substation components, particularly at low frequencies. The simulation and experimental results verified that four types of diagnostic information can be extracted from radio emissions of power system substation circuits: i) harmonic content of the circuit current, ii) fundamental frequency of the circuit current, iii) impulsive signals from rapid circuit current […]

Machines whisper our secrets

UC Riverside News  February 22, 2019 Any active machine emits a trace of some form: physical residue, electromagnetic radiation, acoustic noise, etc. A team of researchers in the US (UC Irvine, UC Riverside) set microphones similar to those in a smartphone in several spots near a DNA synthesizer. After filtering out background noise and running several adjustments to the recorded sound, the researchers found the differences were too subtle for humans to notice. But through a careful feature engineering and bespoke machine-learning algorithm they were able to pinpoint those differences. The researchers could easily distinguish each time the machine produced […]