Lifeboat Foundation

They are as thin as a hair, only a hundred thousand times thinner—so-called two-dimensional materials, consisting of a single layer of atoms, have been booming in research for years. They became known to a wider audience when two Russian-British scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for the discovery of graphene, a building block of graphite. The special feature of such materials is that they possess novel properties that can only be explained with the help of the laws of quantum mechanics and that may be relevant for enhanced technologies. Researchers at the University of Bonn (Germany) have now used ultracold atoms to gain new insights into previously unknown quantum phenomena. They found out that the magnetic orders between two coupled thin films of atoms compete with each other. The study has been published in the journal Nature.

Quantum systems realize very unique states of matter originating from the world of nanostructures. They facilitate a wide variety of new technological applications, e.g. contributing to secure data encryption, introducing ever smaller and faster technical devices and even enabling the development of a quantum computer. In the future, such a computer could solve problems which conventional computers cannot solve at all or only over a long period of time.

How unusual quantum phenomena arise is still far from being fully understood. To shed light on this, a team of physicists led by Prof. Michael Köhl at the Matter and Light for Quantum Computing Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn are using so-called quantum simulators, which mimic the interaction of several quantum particles—something that cannot be done with conventional methods. Even state-of-the-art computer models cannot calculate complex processes such as magnetism and electricity down to the last detail.

As the number of devices connected to the internet continues to increase, so does the amount of redundant data transfer between different sensory terminals and computing units. Computing approaches that intervene in the vicinity of or inside sensory networks could help to process this growing amount of data more efficiently, decreasing power consumption and potentially reducing the transfer of redundant data between sensing and processing units.

Researchers at Hong Kong Polytechnic University have recently carried out a study outlining the concept of near-sensor and in-sensor computing. These are two computing approaches that enable the partial transfer of computation tasks to sensory terminals, which could reduce power consumption and increase the performance of algorithms.

“The number of sensory nodes on the Internet of Things continues to increase rapidly,” Yang Chai, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “By 2032, the number of sensors will be up to 45 trillion, and the generated information from sensory nodes is equivalent to 10²⁰ bit/second. It is thus becoming necessary to shift part of the computation tasks from cloud computing centers to edge devices in order to reduce energy consumption and time delay, saving communication bandwidth and enhancing data security and privacy.”

Over the past 25 years, suicide attacks have emerged as a method used on a large scale by terrorist organizations to inflict lethal damage and create fear and chaos. Data collected by the University of Chicago’s Project on Security & Threats shows that worldwide there were 5, 021 suicide attacks utilizing bombs, which resulted in 47, 253 deaths and 113, 413 wounded from 2000 to 2016.

And recent news reports have highlighted the attempted use of suicide bombs in U.S. subways and city streets as well as on major airlines. An individual willing to sacrifice their own life in an attack is a significant force-multiplier, who too often escapes conventional threat detection methods. However, new technologies may yet close the security gap.

To detect suicide bombers preparing to attack public places and other high-value targets, a research team led by a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School invented a method to detect persons wearing wires or a significant amount of metal that might be part of an explosive device.

Even fitness trackers ruled a big risk due to potential for record-matching identifying your family.

Quantum key distribution is one kind of important cryptographic protocols based on quantum mechanics, in which any outside eavesdropper attempting to obtain the secret key shared by two users will be detected. The successful detection comes from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the measurement of a quantum system, which is required to obtain information of that system, will generally disturb it. The disturbances provide two users with the information that there exists an outside eavesdropper, and they can therefore abort the communication. Nowadays, most people need to share some of their private information for certain services such as products recommendation for online shopping and collaborations between two companies depending on their comm interests. Private Set Intersection Cardinality (PSI-CA) and Private Set Union Cardinality (PSU-CA), which are two primitives in cryptography, involve two or more users who intend to obtain the cardinalities of the intersection and the union of their private sets through the minimum information disclosure of their sets^1,2,3.

The definition of Private Set Intersection (PSI), also called Private Matching (PM), was proposed by Freedman⁴. They employed balanced hashing and homomorphic encryption to design two PSI protocols and also investigated some variants of PSI. In 2012, Cristofaro et al.¹ developed several PSI-CA and PSU-CA protocols with linear computation and communication complexity based on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange which blinds the private information. Their protocols were the most efficient compared with the previous classical related ones. There are also other classical PSI-CA or PSU-CA protocols^5,6,7,8. Nevertheless, the security of these protocols relies on the unproven difficulty assumptions, such as discrete logarithm, factoring, and quadratic residues assumptions, which will be insecure when quantum computers are available^9,10,11.

For the sake of improving the security of PSI-CA protocols for two parties, Shi et al.³ designed a probabilistic protocol where multi-qubit entangled states, complicated oracle operators, and measurements in high N-dimensional Hilbert space were utilized. And the same method in Ref.³ was later used to develop a PSI-CA protocol for multiple parties¹². For easy implementation of a protocol, Shi et al.¹³ leveraged Bell states to construct another protocol for PSI-CA and PSU-CA problems that was more practical than that in Ref.³. In both protocols Ref.³ and Ref.¹³, only two parties who intend to get the cardinalities of the intersection and the union of their private sets are involved. Although Ref.¹² works for multiple parties, it only solves the PSI-CA problem and requires multi-qubit entangled states, complicated oracle operators, and measurements. It then interests us that how we could design a more practical protocol for multiple parties to simultaneously solve PSI-CA and PSU-CA problems. Inspired by Shi et al.’s work, we are thus trying to design a three-party protocol to solve PSI-CA and PSU-CA problems, where every two and three parties can obtain the cardinalities of the intersection and the union of their respective private sets with the aid of a semi-honest third party (TP). TP is semi-honest means that he loyally executes the protocol, makes a note of all the intermediate results, and might desire to take other parties’ private information, but he cannot collude with dishonest parties. We then give a detailed analysis of the presented protocol’s security. Besides, the influence of six typical kinds of Markovian noise on our protocol is also analyzed.

CSL’s Systems and Networking Research Group (SyNRG) is defining a new sub-area of mobile technology that they call “earable computing.” The team believes that earphones will be the next significant milestone in wearable devices, and that new hardware, software, and apps will all run on this platform.

“The leap from today’s earphones to ‘earables’ would mimic the transformation that we had seen from basic phones to smartphones,” said Romit Roy Choudhury, professor in electrical and computer engineering (ECE). “Today’s smartphones are hardly a calling device anymore, much like how tomorrow’s earables will hardly be a smartphone accessory.”

Instead, the group believes tomorrow’s earphones will continuously sense human behavior, run acoustic augmented reality, have Alexa and Siri whisper just-in-time information, track user motion and health, and offer seamless security, among many other capabilities.

The security company FireEye was breached by a sophisticated attack that stole multiple red team assessment tools. Malwarebytes customers are safe.

Hello folks! If you have not heard yet, the security firm FireEye has had a breach of many red team assessment tools used for identification of vulnerabilities to help protect customers.

While it is not known exactly who was behind this attack, a big concern is the sharing and use of these stolen red team tools by both sophisticated and non-sophisticated actors, similar to what we saw in 2017 with the ShadowBrokers group breach of the NSA’s Equation Group.

Circa 2018

Scientists have created an ultrathin, flexible film that can emit laser light — and successfully tested it on a contact lens, demonstrating the possibility of laser eye-beams.

Before you rush out and buy a Cyclops-style visor, it’s not even close to powerful enough to cause damage. Instead, the researchers say, the technology has potential for use as wearable security tags, or even as a type of laser barcode.

Continue reading “Finally, a Contact Lens That Actually Beams Lasers From Your Eyes” »

IBM security researchers said the “precision targeting of executives and key global organizations hold the potential hallmarks of a nation-state tradecraft.”