Lifeboat Foundation

Governments are becoming ever more reliant on digital technology, making them more vulnerable to cyber attacks. In 2007, Estonia was attacked by pro-Russian hackers who crippled government servers, causing havoc. Cyber attacks in Ukraine targeted the country’s electricity grid, while Iran’s nuclear power plants were infected by malware that could have led to a nuclear meltdown.

In the US, president Trump recently declared a “national emergency” to recognise the threat to US computer networks from “foreign adversaries”.

Politically-motivated cyber attacks are becoming increasingly commonplace but unlike traditional warfare between two or more states, cyberwarfare can be launched by groups of individuals. On occasion, the state is actually caught in the crosshairs of competing hacking groups.

Continue reading “Cyber attacks are rewriting the ‘rules’ of modern warfare—and we aren’t prepared for the consequences” »

DARPA has awarded funding to six organizations to support the Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N) program, first announced in March 2018. Battelle Memorial Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Rice University, and Teledyne Scientific are leading multidisciplinary teams to develop high-resolution, bidirectional brain-machine interfaces for use by able-bodied service members. These wearable interfaces could ultimately enable diverse national security applications such as control of active cyber defense systems and swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles, or teaming with computer systems to multitask during complex missions.

“DARPA is preparing for a future in which a combination of unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, and cyber operations may cause conflicts to play out on timelines that are too short for humans to effectively manage with current technology alone,” said Al Emondi, the N program manager. “By creating a more accessible brain-machine interface that doesn’t require surgery to use, DARPA could deliver tools that allow mission commanders to remain meaningfully involved in dynamic operations that unfold at rapid speed.”

Over the past 18 years, DARPA has demonstrated increasingly sophisticated neurotechnologies that rely on surgically implanted electrodes to interface with the central or peripheral nervous systems. The agency has demonstrated achievements such as neural control of prosthetic limbs and restoration of the sense of touch to the users of those limbs, relief of otherwise intractable neuropsychiatric illnesses such as depression, and improvement of memory formation and recall. Due to the inherent risks of surgery, these technologies have so far been limited to use by volunteers with clinical need.

ANN ARBOR—A new computer processor architecture developed at the University of Michigan could usher in a future where computers proactively defend against threats, rendering the current electronic security model of bugs and patches obsolete.

Called MORPHEUS, the chip blocks potential attacks by encrypting and randomly reshuffling key bits of its own code and data 20 times per second—infinitely faster than a human hacker can work and thousands of times faster than even the fastest electronic hacking techniques.

“Today’s approach of eliminating security bugs one by one is a losing game,” said Todd Austin, U-M professor of computer science and engineering and a developer of the system. “People are constantly writing code, and as long as there is new code, there will be new bugs and security vulnerabilities.

Continue reading “Unhackable: New chip stops attacks before they start” »

An NSA attack on China has blown up in America’s face.

Southwest Research Institute has developed a cyber security system to test for vulnerabilities in automated vehicles and other technologies that use GPS receivers for positioning, navigation and timing.

“This is a legal way for us to improve the cyber resilience of autonomous vehicles by demonstrating a transmission of spoofed or manipulated GPS signals to allow for analysis of system responses,” said Victor Murray, head of SwRI’s Cyber Physical Systems Group in the Intelligent Systems Division.

GPS spoofing is a malicious attack that broadcasts incorrect signals to deceive GPS receivers, while GPS manipulation modifies a real GPS signal. GPS satellites orbiting the Earth pinpoint physical locations of GPS receivers embedded in everything from smartphones to ground vehicles and aircraft. SwRI designed the new tool to meet United States federal regulations. Testing for GPS vulnerabilities in a mobile environment had previously been difficult because federal law prohibits over-the-air re-transmission of GPS signals without prior authorization.

Continue reading “Team develops system to legally test GPS spoofing vulnerabilities in automated vehicles” »

This video unpacks my creative process, it distills the way I hack my creativity by following my bliss… it explores the relationship between mood and creativity as well as the link between landscapes that surround us and the states of mind they give rise to…

A new way to store information in molecules could preserve the contents of the New York Public Library in a teaspoon of protein, without energy, for millions of years.

Books can burn. Computers get hacked. DVDs degrade. Technologies to store information–ink on paper, computers, CDs and DVDs, and even DNA–continue to improve. And yet, threats as simple as water and as complex as cyber-attacks can still corrupt our records.

As the data boom continues to boom, more and more information gets filed in less and less space. Even the cloud–whose name promises opaque, endless space–will eventually run out of space, can’t thwart all hackers, and gobbles up energy. Now, a new way to store information could stably house data for millions of years, lives outside the hackable internet, and, once written, uses no energy. All you need is a chemist, some cheap molecules, and your precious information.

Continue reading “Storage beyond the cloud” »

THIS WEEK, I interviewed Yuval Noah Harari, the author of three best-selling books about the history and future of our species, and Fei-Fei Li, one of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence. The event was hosted by the Stanford Center for Ethics and Society, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and the Stanford Humanities Center. A transcript of the event follows, and a video is posted below.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari and computer scientist Fei-Fei Li discuss the promise and perils of the transformative technology with WIRED editor in chief Nicholas Thompson.

Continue reading “Will Artificial Intelligence Enhance or Hack Humanity?” »

Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Texas at Austin have developed a technique for detecting types of malware that use a system’s architecture to thwart traditional security measures. The new detection approach works by tracking power fluctuations in embedded systems.

“Embedded systems are basically any computer that doesn’t have a physical keyboard – from smartphones to Internet of Things devices,” says Aydin Aysu, co-author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State. “Embedded systems are used in everything from the voice-activated virtual assistants in our homes to industrial control systems like those used in power plants. And malware that targets those systems can be used to seize control of these systems or to steal information.”

At issue are so-called micro-architectural attacks. This form of malware makes use of a system’s architectural design, effectively hijacking the hardware in a way that gives outside users control of the system and access to its data. Spectre and Meltdown are high-profile examples of micro-architectural malware.

Continue reading “New technique uses power anomalies to ID malware in embedded systems” »