New Password in a Heartbeat

Pacemakers, insulin pumps, defibrillators and other implantable medical devices often have wireless capabilities that allow emergency workers to monitor patients. But these devices have a potential downside: They can be hacked.
    Researchers at Rice University have come up with a secure way to dramatically cut the risk that an implanted medical device (IMD) could be altered remotely without authorization.

Their technology would use the patient's own heartbeat as a kind of password that could only be accessed through touch.

Rice electrical and computer engineer Farinaz Koushanfar and graduate student Masoud Rostami will present Heart-to-Heart, an authentication system for IMDs, at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Berlin in November. They developed the technology with Ari Juels, former chief scientist at RSA Laboratories, a security company in Cambridge, Mass.

IMDs generally lack the kind of password security found on a home Wi-Fi router because emergency medical technicians often need quick access to the information the devices store to save a life, Rostami said. But that leaves the IMDs open to attack.

"If you have a device inside your body, a person could walk by, push a button and violate your privacy, even give you a shock," he said. "He could make (an insulin pump) inject insulin or update the software of your pacemaker. But our proposed solution forces anybody who wants to read the device to touch you."

The system would require software in the IMD to talk to the "touch" device, called the programmer. When a medical technician touches the patient, the programmer would pick up an electrocardiogram (EKG) signature from the beating heart. The internal and external devices would compare minute details of the EKG and execute a "handshake." If signals gathered by both at the same instant match, they become the password that grants the external device access.

"The signal from your heartbeat is different every second, so the password is different each time," Rostami said. "You can't use it even a minute later."

He compared the EKG to a chart of a financial stock. "We're looking at the minutia," Rostami said. "If you zoom in on a stock, it ticks up and it ticks down every microsecond. Those fine details are the byproduct of a very complex system and they can't be predicted."

A human heartbeat is the same, he said. It seems steady, but on closer view every beat has unique characteristics that can be read and matched. "We treat your heart as if it were a random number generator," he said.

The system could potentially be used with the millions of IMDs already in use, Koushanfar said. "To our knowledge, this is the first fully secure solution that has small overhead and can work with legacy systems," she said. "Like any device that has wireless access, we can simply update the software."

Koushanfar noted the software would require very little of an IMD's precious power, unlike other suggested secure solutions that require computationally intensive -- and battery draining -- cryptography. "We're hopeful," she said. "We think everything here is a practical technology."

Implementation would require cooperation with device manufacturers who, Koushanfar said, hold their valuable, proprietary secrets very close to the chest, as well as approval by the Food and Drug Administration.

But the time to pursue IMD security is here, Rostami insisted. "People will have more implantable devices, not fewer," he said. "We already have devices for the heart and insulin pumps, and now researchers are talking about putting neuron stimulators inside the brain. We should make sure all these things are secure."

New Technology Protects Against Password Theft and Phishing Attacks

New technology launched today by Royal Holloway University, will help protect people from the cyber attack known as "phishing," believed to have affected 37.3 million of us last year, and from online password theft, which rose by 300% during 2012-13.
    Phishing involves cyber criminals creating fake websites that look like real ones and luring users into entering their login details, and sometimes personal and financial information. In recent months, the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has successfully launched phishing attacks against employees of the Financial Times to enable them to post material to its website, and mass attacks were launched within Iran using a fake Google email, shortly before the elections.

Scientists from Royal Holloway have devised a new system called Uni-IDM which will enable people to create electronic identity cards for each website they access. These are then securely stored, allowing owners to simply click on the card when they want to log back in, safe in the knowledge that the data will only be sent to the authentic website. A key feature of the technology is that it is able to recognise the increasing number of websites that offer more secure login systems and present people with a helpful and uniform way of using these.

"We have known for a long time that the username and password system is problematic and very insecure, proving a headache for even the largest websites. LinkedIn was hacked, and over six million stolen user passwords were then posted on a website used by Russian cyber criminals; Facebook admitted in 2011 that 600,000 of its user accounts were being compromised every single day," said Professor Chris Mitchell from Royal Holloway's Information Security Group.

"Despite this, username and password remains the dominant technology, and while large corporations have been able to employ more secure methods, attempts to provide homes with similar protection have been unsuccessful, except in a few cases such as online banking. The hope is that our technology will finally make it possible to provide more sophisticated technology to protect all internet users."

Uni-IDM is also expected to offer a solution for people who will need to access the growing number government services going online, such as tax and benefits claims. The system will provide a secure space for these new users, many of whom may have little experience using the internet.

New Multifunctional Topological Insulator Material With Combined Superconductivity

Most materials show one function, for example, a material can be a metal, a semiconductor, or an insulator. Metals such as copper are used as conducting wires with only low resistance and energy loss. Superconductors are metals which can conduct current even without any resistance, although only far below room temperature. Semiconductors, the foundation of current computer technology, show only low conduction of current, while insulators show no conductivity at all.

Physicists have recently been excited about a new exotic type of materials, so-called topological insulators. A topological insulator is insulating inside the bulk like a normal insulator, while on the surface it shows conductivity like a metal. When a topological insulator is interfaced with a superconductor, a mysterious particle called Majorana fermion emerges, which can be used to fabricate a quantum computer that can run much more quickly than any current computer. Searching for Majorana fermions based on a topological insulator-superconductor interface has thus become a hot race just very recently.

Computer-based materials design has demonstrated its power in scientific research, saving resources and also accelerating the search for new materials for specific purposes. By employing state-of-art materials design methods, Dr. Binghai Yan and his collaborators from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany have recently predicted that the oxide compound BaBiO₃combines two required properties, i.e., topological insulator and superconductivity. This material has been known for about thirty years as a high-temperature superconductor of T_c of nearly 30 Kelvin with p-type doping. Now it has been discovered to be also a topological insulator with n-type doping. A p-n junction type of simple device assisted by gating or electrolyte gating is proposed to realize Majorana fermions for quantum computation, which does not require a complex interface between two materials.

In addition to their options for use in quantum computers, topological insulators hold great potential applications in the emerging technology of spintronics and thermoelectrics for energy harvesting. One major obstacle for widespread application is the relatively small size of the bulk band gap, which is typically around 0.3 electron-volts (eV) for previously known topological insulator materials. Currently identified material exhibits a much larger energy-gap of 0.7 eV. Inside the energy-gap, metallic topological surface states exist with a Dirac-cone type of band structures.

The research leading to the recent publication in Nature Physicswas performed by a team of researchers from Dresden and Mainz around the theoretical physicist Dr. Binghai Yan and the experimental chemists Professor Martin Jansen and Professor Claudia Felser. "Now we are trying to synthesize n-type doped BaBiO₃," said Jansen. "And we hope to be soon able to realize our idea."

Study Shows Over 200 Mobile Apps Related to Dermatology

            A surge of mobile apps related to dermatology has allowed scores of smart phone users to track and diagnose a wide range of skin diseases but doctors are urging caution, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
                  "There are 229 dermatological applications out there and most are free," said Robert Dellavalle, MD, PhD, MSPH, senior author of the study and Associate Professor of Dermatology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "Yet this is an area of buyer beware because there are no regulations and no guarantees that these apps are providing accurate medical information."

The study found mobile applications for monitoring psoriasis, connecting people with patient organizations, diagnosing melanoma, dispensing sun screen advice, dermatology education and skin medications.

Self-surveillance/diagnosis apps vary widely in capabilities. Some allow patients to document lesions, upload and receive dermatologist or algorithm-based feedback about the malignancy potential of lesions, follow diagnosis algorithms and log personal treatment regimens.

Others are focused on a single malady like acne, rosacea, psoriasis or eczema. Patients and doctors can interface on apps and one lets users get pathology results from their phone. Another, Dr. Mole, allows users to photograph a mole and monitor its changes over time to determine if it's cancerous.

The 10 most reviewed apps included:

1. Ultraviolet-UV Index
2. VisualDx
3. SPF
4. iSore
5. SpotMole
6. Pocket Derm
7. Skin Scan
8. Doctor Mole
9. What's My Rash?
10. Skin Conditions

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Monday that it would only regulate the small number of apps that act like medical instruments, those that perform ultrasounds or other procedures.

Dellavalle, Chief of Dermatology at the Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center, said the rise in medical apps in general and dermatology in particular offers the chance to expand care into rural and underserved populations.

They may also help mitigate the shortage of dermatologists nationwide. Still, he urged people to use common sense.

"There is a huge expansion of medical apps across all disciplines now. This will require some caution by users but it also opens up new opportunities," he said. "I think most apps are generally safe right now, but I would not rely solely on them. I would cross-reference them with other apps, other people and with your doctor."

Researchers create 3Gbps LiFi network with LED bulbs

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Henrich Hertz Institute (HHI) in Germany have successfully transmitted data at 3Gbps using conventional LED bulbs in a laboratory setting. In a real-world setting (at a trade fair), the same system was capable of 500Mbps.

The concept of visible light communications (VLC), or LiFi as it is sometimes known, has received a lot of attention in recent years, mostly due to the growing prevalence of LED lighting. Unlike incandescent and fluorescent bulbs, LEDs are solid-state electronics, meaning they can be controlled in much the same way as any other electronic component, and switched at a high speed. VLC is essentially WiFi — but using terahertz radiation (light) instead of microwaves (WiFi). Instead of oscillating a WiFi transmitter, VLC oscillates an LED bulb — and of course, on the receiving end there’s a photodetector instead of an antenna.

Now, unfortunately the Fraunhofer press release is almost completely devoid of detail, except for the 3Gbps bit — but we do have the technical specifications of Fraunhofer’s previous VLC system, which the 3Gbps system is based on. The previous VLC system was capable of transmitting up to 500Mbps over four meters (13 feet), or 120Mbps over 20 meters (67 feet). Rather than actually using a standard LED bulb, Fraunhofer’s VLC system is a black box, with an LED and photodetector on the front, and an Ethernet jack on the back to connect it to the rest of the network. In this system, the hardware only allowed for 30MHz of bandwidth to be used, limiting the total throughput.

To reach 3Gbps, the HHI researchers have found a way of squeezing 180MHz of bandwidth out of the LEDs — and instead of using just one LED, they now use three different colors. It is not clear whether this new technique has a higher or lower range than the previous, but it is likely the same. In real-world testing at a trade fair, with less-than-optimal atmospheric conditions, 3Gbps becomes 500Mbps — still pretty darn fast.
Visible light communication has a slew of advantages. In essence, LiFi can turn any LED lamp into a network connection. LiFi, by virtue of operating at such high frequencies (hundreds of terahertz), is well beyond the sticky tentacles of the wireless spectrum crunch and regulatory licensing. For the same reason, LiFi can be used in areas where there’s extensive RF noise (conventions, trade fairs), or where RF noise is generally prohibited (hospitals, airplanes). The Fraunhofer researchers even claim that VLC improves privacy, because your signal can be easily obscured from prying eyes with opaque materials — but as you can imagine, that’s also a tick in the “con” column as well.

Moving forward, we’re still waiting for the first commercial LiFi LED bulbs and LiFi-equipped laptops/smartphones to come to market. There are a few startups that are making headway, and numerous research groups, but no one seems to have a definitive roadmap for commercial products. With so many possible uses, from street lamp-to-car communications through to ultra-fast short-range communications, and the growing maturity of LED lighting, it’s really just a matter of time until LiFi becomes a reality.