Category Archives: Cryptography

Rooting Out Malware With a Side-Channel Chip Defense System

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The world of malware has been turned on its head this week, as a company in Virginia has introduceda new cybersecurity technology that at first glance looks more like a classic cyberattack.

The idea hatched by PFP Cybersecurity of Vienna, Va., is taken from the playbook of a famous cryptography-breaking scheme called the side channel attack. All malware, no matter the details of its code, authorship, or execution, must consume power. And, as PFP has found, the signature of malwares power usage looks very different from the baseline power draw of a chips standard operations.

So this week, PFP is announcing a two-pronged technology (called P2Scan and eMonitor) that physically sits outside the CPU and sniffs the chips electromagnetic leakage for telltale signatures of power consumption patterns indicating abnormal behavior.

The result, they say, is a practically undetectable, all-purpose malware discovery protocol, especially for low-level systems that follow a predictable and standard routine. (Computers with users regularly attached to them, like laptops and smartphones, often have no baseline routine from which abnormal behavior can be inferred. So, PFP officials say, their technology is at the moment better suited to things like routers, networks, power grids, critical infrastructure, and other more automated systems.)

On average, malware exists on a system for 229 days before anyone ever notices anything is there, Thurston Brooks, PFPs vice president of engineering and product marketing told IEEE Spectrum. Whats really cool about our system is we tell you within milliseconds that something has happened.

PFPan acronym for power fingerprintingrequires that its users establish a firm baseline of normal operations for the chips the company will be monitoring. So they begin with P2Scan, a credit-card-size physical sensor that monitors a given chip, board, device, embedded system, or network router for its electromagnetic fingerprints when running normally.

Unlike most malware strategies in the marketplace today, PFP takes a strikingly software-agnostic tack to besting malware, hardware Trojans, and other cyberattacks.

Were not trying to actually understand whats going on inside the machine, like the hackers are, says Brooks. Were trying to define what normal behavior looks like. Then, knowing [that], we can detect abnormal behavior.

The view of malware as seen from outside the chip, in other words, can be a refreshing one. Hackers cant detect this type of surveillance, because the scanning tools never actually interact with the chips operations. And hackers can be as clever as the most sophisticated programmers in the world. Yet, their code will still very likely be detected because, simply by virtue of performing different tasks than the chip normally performs, it will have a different power profile.

I am a signal processing guy, says PFP president Jeff Reed, who is also a professor in the ECE department at Virginia Tech. Our approach is a very different approach than a person whos normally schooled in securityWere trying to understand a disturbance in the signal due to the inclusion of malware.

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Rooting Out Malware With a Side-Channel Chip Defense System

New Associate Head of EECS Announced

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New Associate Head of EECS Announced

January 27, 2015

New Associate Head of EECS Announced

Professor Silvio Micali succeeded Professor Bill Freeman as Associate Head of MITs Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) on Jan. 15.

Professor Micalis appointment was announced by EECS Department Head Anantha Chandrakasan. According to the MIT News Office, Chandrakasan said that Micali would bring clarity, creativity, and passion to his new position.

Micali, an EECS professor since 1983, has received numerous awards for his work in cryptography and information security, including the RSA Mathematics Award and the Gdel Prize in theoretical computer science. He and MIT professor Shafi Goldwasser won the 2012 (ACM) A.M. Turing award in theoretical computer science for their advances in cryptography. Micali also founded two startup companies, Peppercoin and CoreStreet, and possesses over 50 patents related to his work in information security.

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New Associate Head of EECS Announced

Is glass a true solid? New research suggests it is

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Does glass ever stop flowing? Researchers at the University of Bristol and Kyoto University have combined computer simulation and information theory, originally invented for telephone communication and cryptography, to answer this puzzling question.

Watching a glass blower at work we can clearly see the liquid nature of hot glass. Once the glass has cooled down to room temperature though, it has become solid and we can pour wine in it or make window panes out of it.

On a microscopic scale, solidification means that molecules have settled into a crystalline structure. And yet, when looked at under the microscope, it appears glass never settles down but keeps flowing, albeit extremely slowly -- so slowly, in fact, that it would take over 10 million years for a window pane to flow perceptibly.

This puzzle of a material which seems solid to any observer while appearing fluid under the microscope is an old one. And even with the help of today's supercomputers it seems impossible to verify in simulations whether a glass ever stops flowing.

To answer the question of what happens at very low temperature, and whether the whole material becomes truly solid, researchers in Bristol's Schools of Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics led by Dr Paddy Royall and Dr Karoline Wiesner, teamed up with Professor Ryoichi Yamamoto of Kyoto University.

The researchers discovered that the size of the solid-like regions of the material increases over time and that atoms in the solid-like regions organize into geometrical shapes, such as icosahedra. Such icosahedral configurations were predicted in 1952 by Sir Charles Frank at the University of Bristol's HH Wills Physics Laboratory.

Dr Karoline Wiesner said: "Information theory provided us with the mathematical tools to detect and quantify the movements of atoms, which turned out to move as if they were in communication with each other."

Dr Paddy Royall added: "We found that the size of the solid regions of icosahedra would grow until eventually there would be no more liquid regions and so the glass should be a true solid."

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The above story is based on materials provided by University of Bristol. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Is glass a true solid? New research suggests it is

Is glass a true solid?

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Does glass ever stop flowing? Researchers at the University of Bristol and Kyoto University have combined computer simulation and information theory, originally invented for telephone communication and cryptography, to answer this puzzling question.

Watching a glass blower at work we can clearly see the liquid nature of hot glass. Once the glass has cooled down to room temperature though, it has become solid and we can pour wine in it or make window panes out of it.

On a microscopic scale, solidification means that molecules have settled into a crystalline structure. And yet, when looked at under the microscope, it appears glass never settles down but keeps flowing, albeit extremely slowly - so slowly, in fact, that it would take over 10 million years for a window pane to flow perceptibly.

This puzzle of a material which seems solid to any observer while appearing fluid under the microscope is an old one. And even with the help of today's supercomputers it seems impossible to verify in simulations whether a glass ever stops flowing.

To answer the question of what happens at very low temperature, and whether the whole material becomes truly solid, researchers in Bristol's Schools of Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics led by Dr Paddy Royall and Dr Karoline Wiesner, teamed up with Professor Ryoichi Yamamoto of Kyoto University.

The researchers discovered that the size of the solid-like regions of the material increases over time and that atoms in the solid-like regions organize into geometrical shapes, such as icosahedra. Such icosahedral configurations were predicted in 1952 by Sir Charles Frank at the University of Bristol's HH Wills Physics Laboratory.

Dr Karoline Wiesner said: "Information theory provided us with the mathematical tools to detect and quantify the movements of atoms, which turned out to move as if they were in communication with each other."

Dr Paddy Royall added: "We found that the size of the solid regions of icosahedra would grow until eventually there would be no more liquid regions and so the glass should be a true solid."

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The research, which was carried out as part of the Bristol-Kyoto agreement and Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences, is published today in Nature Communications.

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Is glass a true solid?

After The Social Web, Here Comes The Trust Web

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Editors note:David Cohen is the founder and Managing Partner of Techstars, the #1 ranked Internet startup accelerator in the world. William Mougayar is an entrepreneur turned angel investor, founder of Startup Management, and currently raising his first fund.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.- Buckminster Fuller

The bitcoin train is really made up of two revolutions in one: money and finance, based on the bitcoin protocol, and exploiting the currency programmability aspects; and decentralized applications, based on the blockchains distributed technology capabilities.

Both are grounded in similar roots (crypto-technology), but they have different branching. Both paths are creating disruptive, innovative and system-changing opportunities for startups, investors, consumers and business players. Both are joined at the hip, and that hip is the blockchain, the backbone of crypto-based transactions.

To fully understand the blockchain concept and the benefits of cryptography in computer science, we need to first understand the concept of decentralized consensus, a key tenet of the crypto-based computing revolution.

Decentralized consensus breaks the old paradigm of centralized consensus, i.e. when one central database used to rule transaction validity. A decentralized scheme (which the bitcoin protocol is based on) transfers authority andtrust to a decentralized network and enables its nodes to continuously and sequentially record their transactions on a public block, creating a unique chain the blockchain. Cryptography (via hash codes) is used to secure the authentication of the transaction source and removes the need for a central intermediary. The combination of cryptography and blockchain technology together ensures there is never a duplicate recording of the same transaction.

This degree of unbundling is enabling a new way of writing software, and it is a spark of innovation for money- and non-money-related decentralized applications.

There are different flavors of crypto-technology-related implementations. Some are based on the bitcoin blockchain itself and others on an independent decentralized one. Some are based on the bitcoin currency and others on alternative cryptocurrencies or branded tokens. All these various permutations are creating a rich ecosystem environment for cryptocurrency-based innovations.

To say that bitcoin and its sole blockchain hold a monopoly on the future of cryptocurrency-based implementations is like saying in 2006 that LinkedIn was the onlysocialnetwork needed when it was barely leading, and when Facebook, Twitter and many othersocialplatforms were still babies.

We need to view what is happening today as a rich ecosystem that represents the best blend of computer and cryptography science, and not just as an ecosystem of bitcoin-centric technologies.

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After The Social Web, Here Comes The Trust Web