Displaying items by tag: MIT

Privacy is something that many people think they want and have on the internet. Of course, most of us actually know that Privacy is not something that really exists in the broader internet. Unless you control all points in the traffic stream, someone can read your communication. Even proxy services like TOR are no guarantee of privacy or anonymity. Proxy services are vulnerable to a multitude of packet and flow monitoring that allow for some fairly easy unmasking techniques.

Scientists from the MIT's Media Lab have presented the concept of flexible screens that you can literally pinch, pull out or push in.

When I was in elementary school one of the science projects that we had was to build our own camera. Now when I first heard this I was extremely excited. To me a camera was this amazing thing with lenses and batteries etc. I was more than a little disappointed and confused when your materials list was cardboard, tin-foil duct-tape, and a 126 film cartridge. What we found out was that we were exploring the principle of how we see things based in reflected light (I now boring compared to building a REAL camera). In the end what we built was a pin-hole camera which we used to attempt to photograph a solar eclipse (no, none of got anything near a good picture).

Security is the bane of every network in the world. It is the reason why so many IT technicians end up burnt out or (in the case of men) bald. We all know that the only secure system is one that does not allow anything (and I mean ANYTHING) to connect, or input to the system. As soon as you connect a system to any type of input device or medium (say a network/the Internet) you open up vulnerabilities.

Even the most sophisticated firewall can be gotten around with time, effort and some creativity. This is all just the wired networks; we have not even begun to talk about wireless networks. These handy security holes create a whole new level stress for the IT technician. After all with not much more than a laptop and the right Lunix ISO you can grab packets out of the air and find out the WEP, WPA and if you are patient enough even WPA2 keys. True you can add RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial In User Service) and certificates into the mix if you have the budget, but what about the home user? Or even better… what about our cellular networks?

For a long time it was thought that wireless could be secured with simple encryption and trusted networks. Then we found that these data packets can be intercepted in route and either spoofed or blocked creating a security breach. This, in extremely simplistic terms, is a Man-in-the-Middle attack and it is a very dangerous one.

Fortunately some researchers at MIT have developed a protocol that can potentially prevent these be encoding a specific transmission sequence in the originating packet. The sequence is a series of ones and zeros (data and silence) that when put together indicate to the receiving party that this is the correct sender.  It does this in multiple ways to prevent, blocking, Collision, and spoofing of packets which are used by the most common Man-in-the-Middle attacks.  The nice thing about this new protocol is that it can be applied to almost any network including both 4G network types.

Source NetworkWorld

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