Lifeboat Foundation

Looking to get into fault injection for your reverse engineering projects, but don’t have the cash to lay out for the necessary hardware? Fear not, for the tools to glitch a chip may be as close as the nearest barbecue grill.

If you don’t know what chip glitching is, perhaps a primer is in order. Glitching, more formally known as electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI), or simply fault injection, is a technique that uses a pulse of electromagnetic energy to induce a fault in a running microcontroller or microprocessor. If the pulse occurs at just the right time, it may force the processor to skip an instruction, leaving the system in a potentially exploitable state.

EMFI tools are commercially available — we even recently featured a kit to build your own — but [rqu]’s homebrew version is decidedly simpler and cheaper than just about anything else. It consists of a piezoelectric gas grill igniter, a little bit of enameled magnet wire, and half of a small toroidal ferrite core. The core fragment gets a few turns of wire, which then gets soldered to the terminals on the igniter. Pressing the button generates a high-voltage pulse, which gets turned into an electromagnetic pulse by the coil. There’s a video of the tool in use in the Twitter thread, showing it easily glitching a PIC running a simple loop program.

In recent years, computer-generated animations of animals and humans have become increasingly detailed and realistic. Nonetheless, producing convincing animations of a character’s face as it’s talking remains a key challenge, as it typically entails the successful combination of a series of different audio and video elements.

A team of computer scientists at TCS Research in India has recently created a new model that can produce highly realistic talking face animations that integrate audio recordings with a character’s head motions. This model, introduced in a paper presented at ICVGIP 2021, the twelfth Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, could be used to create more convincing virtual avatars, digital assistants, and animated movies.

“For a pleasant viewing experience, the perception of realism is of utmost importance, and despite recent research advances, the generation of a realistic talking face remains a challenging research problem,” Brojeshwar Bhowmick, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Alongside accurate lip synchronization, realistic talking face animation requires other attributes of realism such as natural eye blinks, head motions and preserving identity information of arbitrary target faces.”

Drilling with the beam of an electron microscope, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory precisely machined tiny electrically conductive cubes that can interact with light and organized them in patterned structures that confine and relay light’s electromagnetic signal. This demonstration is a step toward potentially faster computer chips and more perceptive sensors.

The seeming wizardry of these structures comes from the ability of their surfaces to support collective waves of electrons, called plasmons, with the same frequency as light waves but with much tighter confinement. The light-guiding structures are measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter—100,000 times thinner than a human hair.

Continue reading “Precision machining produces tiny, light-guiding cubes for advancing info tech” »

https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-01-27

What are the next lithography-related issues as device scaling continues to the next process nodes?

Topics include the prospects of technological acceleration, Metaverse development and immersive computing, transcendence and cybernetic immortality, neurotechnologies and mind uploading, outer and inner space exploration, Global Mind and phase transition of humanity, physics of time and information, consciousness, evolutionary cybernetics, Chrysalis conjecture and Transcension hypothesis, Artificial General Intelligence and cyberhumanity, transhumanism and singularity, Fermi Paradox, Omega Point cosmology, Cybernetic Theory of Mind, and more. https://www.ecstadelic.net/e_news/metaverse-news-network-liv…x-vikoulov #Metaverse #Singularity #Transhumanism #Transcension #Futurism #Cybernetics #SyntellectHypothesis #AlexVikoulov

Three separate teams worldwide published the feat on Nature — all on the same day.

In a historic milestone for silicon-based quantum computing systems, three separate teams of researchers have published papers on Nature, detailing the steps and system architecture required for fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Time crystals. Microwaves. Diamonds. What do these three disparate things have in common?

Quantum computing. Unlike traditional computers that use bits, quantum computers use qubits to encode information as zeros or ones, or both at the same time. Coupled with a cocktail of forces from quantum physics, these refrigerator-sized machines can process a whole lot of information — but they’re far from flawless. Just like our regular computers, we need to have the right programming languages to properly compute on quantum computers.

Programming quantum computers requires awareness of something called “entanglement,” a computational multiplier for qubits of sorts, which translates to a lot of power. When two qubits are entangled, actions on one qubit can change the value of the other, even when they are physically separated, giving rise to Einstein’s characterization of “spooky action at a distance.” But that potency is equal parts a source of weakness. When programming, discarding one qubit without being mindful of its entanglement with another qubit can destroy the data stored in the other, jeopardizing the correctness of the program.

Last fall, Texas Governor Greg Abbott gathered dozens of cryptocurrency deal makers in Austin where they discussed an idea that, on its face, seemed almost upside down: Electricity-hungry Bitcoin miners could shore up the state’s power grid, a top priority after a deep freeze last winter triggered blackouts that left hundreds dead.

The industry’s advocates have been making that pitch to the governor for years. The idea is that the miners’ computer arrays would demand so much electricity that someone would come along to build more power plants, something Texas badly needs. If the grid starts to go wobbly, as it did when winter storm Uri froze up power plants in February 2021, miners could quickly shut down to conserve energy for homes and businesses. At least two Bitcoin miners have already volunteered to do just that.

A platform for single-molecule measurement of binding kinetics & enzyme activity.

The first molecular electronics chip has been developed, realizing a 50-year-old goal of integrating single molecules into circuits to achieve the ultimate scaling limits of Moore’s Law. Developed by Roswell Biotechnologies and a multi-disciplinary team of leading academic scientists, the chip uses single molecules as universal sensor elements in a circuit to create a programmable biosensor with real-time, single-molecule sensitivity and unlimited scalability in sensor pixel density. This innovation, appearing this week in a peer-reviewed article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), will power advances in diverse fields that are fundamentally based on observing molecular interactions, including drug discovery, diagnostics, DNA

Continue reading “First Molecular Electronics Chip Developed — Realizes 50-Year-Old Goal” »