New Theory Leads to Gigahertz Antenna on a Chip

Posted on by

You can see such symmetry breaking in a once-common 20th century technology: the two-wire ribbons used during television’s first few decades to send RF signals from rooftop VHF antennas to television sets without any loss. The electric RF current in the two conductors flow in opposite directions and have opposite phase. Because of the translational symmetry (the two conductors are parallel) the radiation fields cancel each other out, so there is no net radiation into space. But if you would flare the ends of the two conductors at one end of the ribbon, they aren’t parallel anymore and you break the translational symmetry. The two electric fields are no longer aligned and don’t cancel each other out, causing the RF signal to be converted into electromagnetic radiation.

via New Theory Leads to Gigahertz Antenna on a Chip – IEEE Spectrum.

Google Wants To Speed Up The Web With Its QUIC Protocol

Posted on by

On a typical secure TCP connection, it typically takes two or three round-trips before the browser can actually start receiving data. Using QUIC, a browser can immediately start talking to a server it has talked to before. QUIC also introduces a couple of new features like congestion control and automatic re-transmission, making it more reliable that pure UDP.

via Google Wants To Speed Up The Web With Its QUIC Protocol | TechCrunch.

Users who connect to YouTube over QUIC report about 30 percent fewer rebuffers when watching videos and because of QUIC’s improved congestion control and loss recover over UDP, users on some of the slowest connection also see improved page load times with QUIC.

Google says it plans to propose HTTP2-over-QUIC to the IETF as a new Internet standard in the future.

Decertifying the worst voting machine in the US

Posted on by

I’ve been in the security field for 30 years, and it takes a lot to surprise me. But the VITA report really shocked me – as bad as I thought the problems were likely to be, VITA’s five-page report showed that they were far worse. And the WinVote system was so fragile that it hardly took any effort. While the report does not state how much effort went into the investigation, my estimation based on the description is that it was less than a person week.

via Decertifying the worst voting machine in the US.

So how would someone use these vulnerabilities to change an election?

  1. Take your laptop to a polling place, and sit outside in the parking lot.
  2. Use a free sniffer to capture the traffic, and use that to figure out the WEP password (which VITA did for us).
  3. Connect to the voting machine over WiFi.
  4. If asked for a password, the administrator password is “admin” (VITA provided that).
  5. Download the Microsoft Access database using Windows Explorer.
  6. Use a free tool to extract the hardwired key (“shoup”), which VITA also did for us.
  7. Use Microsoft Access to add, delete, or change any of the votes in the database.
  8. Upload the modified copy of the Microsoft Access database back to the voting machine.
  9. Wait for the election results to be published.

The freedom to tinker blog has been doing research on voting machines for a very long time although in this case they are reporting the results of research done by Virginia IT people in their decertification. In the past most vulnerabilities uncovered required physical access to a voting machine and a bit of skullduggery making it difficult to change votes on a large scale. I simply cannot comprehend for what purpose these voting devices needed to be on a wifi network other than someone thought it was “cool.” This entire report is mind boggling and makes me wonder how many more areas of the country are doing this now.

US Report Claims In-Flight Entertainment Leaves Planes Open to Cyberattacks; Others Disagree

Posted on by

A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) warns that in-flight W-Fi, including wireless entertainment and internet-based cockpit communications, may allow hackers to gain remote access to avionics systems and compromise them. However, other experts disagree and call the report “deceiving.”

via US Report Claims In-Flight Entertainment Leaves Planes Open to Cyberattacks; Others Disagree.

From:  Cyberhijacking Airplanes: Truth or Fiction? – DEFCON-22-Phil-Polstra-Cyber-hijacking-Airplanes-Truth-or-Fiction-Updated.pdf.

Closing Thoughts
● Nearly every protocol used in aviation is
unsecured
● There is certainly the potential to annoy
ATC and/or small aircraft
● Increasing automation while continuing
with unsecured protocols is problematic
● Airliners are relatively safe (for now)

The above pdf is a good read.

Statistics Will Crack Your Password

Posted on by

This means that the top 13 unique mask structures make up 50% of the passwords from the sample. Over 20 million passwords in the sample have a structure within the top 13 masks.

via Statistics Will Crack Your Password.

Based on analyzing the data, there are logical factors that help explain how this is possible. When users are asked to provide a password that contains an uppercase letter, over 90% of the time it is put as the first character. When asked to use a digit, most users will put two digits at the end of their password (graduation year perhaps)

Nokia Agrees to $16.6 Billion Takeover of Alcatel-Lucent

Posted on by

LONDON — The Finnish telecommunications company Nokia said on Wednesday that it had agreed to an all-stock deal to acquire Alcatel-Lucent that valued its French rival at about $16.6 billion.

The combined company is expected to become the world’s second-largest telecom equipment manufacturer, behind Ericsson of Sweden, with global revenues totaling $27 billion and operations spread across Asia, Europe and North America.

via Nokia Agrees to $16.6 Billion Takeover of Alcatel-Lucent – NYTimes.com.

Prosecutors suspect man hacked lottery computers to score winning ticket

Posted on by

In court documents filed last week, prosecutors said there is evidence to support the theory Tipton used his privileged position inside the lottery association to enter a locked room that housed the random number generating computers and infect them with software that allowed him to control the winning numbers. The room was enclosed in glass, could only be entered by two people at a time, and was monitored by a video camera. To prevent outside attacks, the computers aren’t connected to the Internet. Prosecutors said Tipton entered the so-called draw room on November 20, 2010, ostensibly to change the time on the computers. The cameras on that date recorded only one second per minute rather than running continuously like normal.

via Prosecutors suspect man hacked lottery computers to score winning ticket | Ars Technica.

Cool, but obscure unix tools

Posted on by

Just a list of 20 (now 28) tools for the command line. Some are little-known, some are just too useful to miss, some are pure obscure — I hope you find something useful that you weren’t aware of yet! Use your operating system’s package manager to install most of them. (Thanks for the tips, everybody!)

via Cool, but obscure unix tools :: Software architect Kristof Kovacs.

Infamous “podcasting patent” knocked out

Posted on by

The ‘504 patent has a priority date of 1996, but as the EFF showed during its challenge to the patent office, that’s hardly the beginning of “episodic content” on the Internet. The EFF relied on two key examples of earlier technology to beat the patent: one was CNN’s “Internet Newsroom,” which patent office judges found fulfilled the key claims of having “(1) episodes; (2) an updated compilation file; and (3) a ‘predetermined URL’ for the compilation file.”

via Infamous “podcasting patent” knocked out | Ars Technica.