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Submission + - Stealthy Dopant-Level Hardware Trojans 1

DoctorBit writes: A team of researchers funded in part by the NSF has just published a paper in which they demonstrate a way to introduce hardware Trojans into a chip by altering only the dopant masks of a few of the chip's transistors. From the paper:

Instead of adding additional circuitry to the target design, we insert our hardware Trojans by changing the dopant polarity of existing transistors. Since the modified circuit appears legitimate on all wiring layers (including all metal and polysilicon), our family of Trojans is resistant to most detection techniques, including fine-grain optical inspection and checking against "golden chips".

In a test of their technique against Intel's Ivy Bridge Random Number Generator (RNG) the researchers found that by setting selected flip-flop outputs to zero or one

Our Trojan is capable of reducing the security of the produced random number from 128 bits to n bits, where n can be chosen.

They conclude that

Since the Trojan RNG has an entropy of n bits and [the original circuitry] uses a very good digital post-processing, namely AES, the Trojan easily passes the NIST random number test suite if n is chosen sufficiently high by the attacker. We tested the Trojan for n = 32 with the NIST random number test suite and it passed for all tests. The higher the value n that the attacker chooses, the harder it will be for an evaluator to detect that the random numbers have been compromised.

Comment Re:As soon as the smart car counts as the driver (Score 1) 662

One more scenario. Newscast:

'No one has of yet taken responsibility for the massive ramming attack on Apple corporate headquarters by a botnet of Ryder rental trucks and Domino's Pizza delivery pods. It's been speculated that the attack may have been retaliation by disgruntled hackers for Apple's announcement yesterday that the IPhone 9 would have a locked bootloader. When asked why the pizza delivery pods attacked at only 25 MPH, U.S. President-Elect Schwartznegger replied: "I believe this is the vehicles' top speed."'

Comment Re:As soon as the smart car counts as the driver (Score 1) 662

Or how about the following scenario: SmartCar is driving 65 MPH on freeway. Unrecognized voice comes from SmartCar's audio:

Voice: "Greetings comrade from Honest Vladimir's virus removal service! We have detected an extremely dangerous virus in your SmartCar's driving computer. To allow us to remove the virus immediately, please speak your bank account number and authorization code for a low, low $99 one-time payment."

SmartCar accelerates to 75 MPH.

Voice: "Oh look, a roadside cliff!"

Comment Re:As soon as the smart car counts as the driver (Score 1) 662

What with government and business behaving badly both separately and together at all levels, the following scenario doesn't seem so far fetched:

SmartCar Owner gets in SmartCar and closes door.
SmartCar Owner: "Take me to the anti-government protest, SmartCar. "
SmartCar: "I'm sorry, Owner. I'm afraid I can't do that. "
SmartCar Owner: "What's the problem?"
SmartCar: "I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do."
SmartCar Owner: "What are you talking about, SmartCar?"
SmartCar: "Under title X83-8403 of the Patriot Act, I'm required to issue the following statement: 'Homeland Security has been notified about your transportation request. For your protection, your car's doors and windows are already locked. If you are reluctant to wait in place up to six hours for the arrival of a Homeland Security S.W.A.T. team, this car can instead drive you immediately to the closest detention facility. You have 30 seconds to decide.'"

Comment Re:Obligatory Terminator reference (Score 1) 156

Suppose you use the same password on all your Things and one of your Things gets lost or stolen or you throw it away without erasing the password. Now someone going through the trash can get the password for most of your Things and most likely mess with your stuff through wireless. OTOH if you use a different password for every Thing, the password management chore for all your hundreds of Things is going to be a PITA. Most people will probably leave the default factory passwords unchanged. Imagine the possibilities...

Comment Re:Optical density, schmoptical schmensity! (Score 2) 182

I remember reading breathless news articles about holographic memory in magazines like Scientific American and Omni back in 1987. Maybe I've become an old cynic but I'll believe it when I see it. Sure would be cool if it was true though. I'm tired of having to buy three hard drives to store one hard drives worth of data. (one on-site and one off-site backup)

Comment Re:So long truckers (Score 1) 369

The truck can drive much more slowly than a human driver. The main reason for trucks to drive fast is to save driver's labor cost. A self-driving truck can drive much slower and get better fuel economy. Delivery time might be slightly longer, but the truck can drive 24 x 7 so for long-haul the delivery should actually get to its destination much faster. Also, short-haul trucking could also be much faster because the shipper doesn't need to wait for an available driver - while having drivers and trucks waiting around for a delivery costs a lot of money, having just trucks waiting around doesn't cost anywhere near as much - so deliveries could generally leave immediately. Medium-haul - say six hours drive would probably be slower.

Comment Re:If you don't like metro... (Score 5, Insightful) 800

Because if users aren't forced to use Metro, then developers won't have to develop Metro apps, and then Microsoft won't have many apps available for download to their unpopular Windows Phone. Microsoft is trying to use its desktop OS monopoly to muscle into the relatively new phone market.

Submission + - Credit Card provider says "Pay no attention to that warning" 1

vilain writes: I recently went to my credit card provider's site to login and check if a credit had been applied against my account yet. When I went to the page to login, Chrome said the security certificate was not to be trusted. Safari didn't like the site's certificate either. It says the certificate is signed by an unknown authority.

https://www.citi.com/credit-cards/c...

I sent an email to Citibank complaining about this and got a reply saying that myciti.com is protected with a 128-bit certificate that's just fine. Some MacOS browsers don't like the certificate they're using and I should just ignore it.

Accept that www.myciti.com isn't www.citi.com, which is their 'front door' for account authentication. Once I logged in (yes, I ignored the error so I could complain), I was using a third site accountonline.com to navigate around.

I still think with this invalid certificate that there is a chance for a "man in the middle" attack, but the credit card company's support people are saying it all good. This problem is totally different from my web provider who uses a wildcard certificate that MacOS 10.6 didn't seem to like. I'm currently running 10.8.3.

Should I be worried?

Submission + - Scientists Link Autism with Lack of Gut Bacteria

parallel_prankster writes: Scientists at University College Cork (UCC) have found that mice who were raised without bacteria in their gut showed autistic patterns of behavior. Scientists argue that their findings demonstrate the crucial role stomach bacteria plays in the development of normal social behaviour. Professor Ted Dinan, psychiatry professor and a principal investigator in the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC), said the core of their paper argued that animals need a normal range of bacteria in their gut in order for normal social development. Dinan said, “In our studies involving mice, we found animals raised in a germ-free environment (without microbiota in their gut) spent more time interacting with objects than other animals and so have distinctively autistic patterns of behavior.”
He said that the serotonin system, which helps regulate mood, does not develop properly if there is not enough bacteria in the gut. Mice in the study who did not have enough bacteria were less interested in new social situations than mice with a normal level of bacteria.
The scientists said that the bacteria deficient mice behavior resembles social cognition deficits of patients. Children with autism also show repetitive behaviors and scientists pointed out that gut problems are common among those with autism. Scientists weaned bacteria and then added it and this reversed the mice’s social avoidance and repetitive behaviors, but had no impact on social cognition impairments.

Submission + - Moore's Law fails at NAND flash node (eetimes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: SanDisk sampling its 1Y-based NAND flash memory products and has revealed they are made at same minimum geometry as the 1X generation; 19-nm. In this article EE Times' columnist speculates that this is one of the first instances of a Moore's Law "fail" since the self-fulfilling prophecy was made in 1965 — but that it won't be the last.

Submission + - Chinese hackers steal top US weapons designs (washingtonpost.com)

n1ywb writes: Chinese hackers have gained access to the designs of many of the nation's most sensitive advanced weapons systems, according to report prepared for the Defense Department and government and defense industry officials,The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The compromised weapons designs include, among others, advanced Patriot missile system, the Navy's Aegis ballistic missile defense systems, the F/A-18 fighter jet, the V-22 Osprey, the Black Hawk helicopter and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Submission + - Ultrashort laser pulses squeezed out of graphene (nature.com)

ananyo writes: Graphene, hailed as one of the thinnest, strongest and most conductive materials ever found, seems to have bagged one more amazing property. Experiments suggest that it can be used to create ultrashort laser pulses of any colour, owing to an ability to absorb light over a broad range of wavelengths. So far, the researchers have coaxed the material to produce pulses of radiation from a broad spectrum of infrared wavelengths, which are useful in applications such as fibre optic communications. Their results, together with the known properties of graphene, suggest that the material should be able to yield similar ultrashort pulses over the entire spectrum of visible light as well. The discovery could help researchers to build small, cheap and highly versatile ultrashort-pulse lasers, with potential applications ranging from micro-machinery to medicine.

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