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iPad And Kinect Hacked To Steer RC Car (video)

Now That's what surely a B.Tech student would like. However the converse isn't true.
Imaginative ways to use Microsofts Kinect keep appearing daily and another worth a mentioning today is the is this hack that uses either an iPad or Kinect to take control of a remote control car.
The project has beed setup to show how hand gestures can be used to control R/C vehicles and one uses a Kinect and the other a HTML5 web application, with use of WebSockets, DeviceMotionEvent, Canvas.  Watch a video of the hack after the jump, to see the iPad and Kinect hacks in action.

Your Mobile is a Spy.....eyes on YOU!

While most of us know it is theoretically possible for our movements to be tracked by detecting which tower our mobile phone is connected too, it might come as a shock to see just how much of a digital footprint we leave as we go about our daily lives. German Green Party politician Malte Spitz and German newspaper Die Zeit have provided a frightening insight into just how much information can be gleaned from the digital breadcrumbs we drop every day by creating an interactive map showing Spitz's movements and activities over a five month period based on mobile phone data and information freely available on the internet.

To get hold of his mobile phone data, Spitz sued his service provider, German telco giant Deutsche Telekom. He then provided the phone data, which included geolocation and time and date information, to Die Zeit who combined the data with information freely available on the internet – including Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites – that related to his life as a politician to create an interactive map of Spitz's movements and activities.

And before you start thinking a public figure like Spitz is going to generate more data than your average man in the street, you might want to take a moment to consider just how many tweets, blog posts and Facebook updates you fire off on a daily basis.

In the age of ubiquitous computing and technologies such as RFID chips, the ability for corporations and governments to track not only our movements but also our activities is only set to increase and raises questions about the rights of individuals to privacy in the digital age. But as shown by Die Zeit's interactive map, which was based on data collected from August 2009 to February 2010, the information required to form a pretty detailed picture of our lives is already out there.

SMS of Death may kill your phone

The phones in many people's pockets today are miniature personal computers, and they are just as vulnerable as PCs to viruses, malware, and other security problems. But research presented at a conference in Germany last week shows that phones don't even have to be smart to be vulnerable to hackers.
 

Using only Short Message Service (SMS) communications—messages that can be sent between mobile phones—a pair of security researchers were able to force low-end phones to shut down abruptly and knock them off a cellular network. As well as text messages, the SMS protocol can be used to transmit small programs, called "binaries" that run on a phone. Network operators use these files to, for example, change the settings on a device remotely. The researchers used the same approach to attack phones. They performed their tricks on handsets made by Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Micromax, a popular Indian cell-phone manufacturer.

A number of largely theoretical attacks aimed at iPhones and Android devices have made headlines over the past few years. But smart phones make up only 16 percent of the devices in use. So-called feature phones—which can do more than make calls but run only software with limited functionality, enabling their users to do such things as send text messages and play games—account for the majority of around 5 billion mobile phones in use worldwide.

Feature phones are harder to attack than smart phones because of their limitations. Their processors are less powerful, and they have less memory capacity, so they must run simpler software, which often cannot be loaded unless the carrier gives permission. Feature phones also have more varied hardware and software idiosyncrasies than smart phones do.

The security researchers who presented their work at last week's conference, Collin Mulliner, a PhD student in the Security in Telecommunications department at the Technische Universitaet Berlin, and Nico Golde, an undergraduate student at the same institution, decided to attack feature phones over the air. They set up a miniature cellular network, using open-source software to create a base station with which to communicate with the phones. In order to broadcast malicious messages to them without putting other devices at risk, they shielded their communications by enclosing their network in a Faraday cage, which blocks radio signals.

Having a private cell network also helped Mulliner and Golde study the software running on low-end phones. By monitoring the way the phones communicated with their base station, they could discern important information about how the phones worked and how SMS messages could affect them.

The researchers were able to create malicious SMS messages for each type of phone they studied. The messages affect the phones without any response from the user. Because feature phones are so common, Mulliner says, such an attack "could take out a large percentage of mobile communications."

To target a specific user, an attacker would need to know what kind of phone he or she uses, since each platform requires a different message. But Mulliner says that attackers could easily knock out large numbers of phones by sending a set of five SMS messages—targeted to the five most popular models—to every device on a specific network. Mulliner notes that there are Internet-based services that send SMS messages en masse either cheaply or free, making it possible for an antagonist with limited resources to carry out such an attack from anywhere in the world.

"The only people who can defend against this attack are the network operators," Mulliner says. To prevent problems, operators would have to update the firmware on existing phones or else filter out potentially disruptive SMS messages traveling across their networks. The latter approach would be difficult, he says, because filtering software, generally used to catch spam, is not optimized to catch binaries.

Mulliner and Golde say they contacted network operators and manufacturers months before their talk but were told it wasn't possible to get fixes ready in time.

Because feature phones are so widespread, the problems found by Mulliner and Golde could affect a lot of people, Miller says. Still, attackers would find it difficult to steal personal information or take control of the phones. In contrast, SMS vulnerabilities in iPhones and Windows Mobile-based HTC devices enable an attacker to take over phones, Miller says, citing research that he and Mulliner conducted a couple of years ago. Defending against mass attacks on feature phones may in practice prove enormously difficult. Aurélien Francillon, a researcher in the system security group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, says, "Most of those phones don't have automated updates, and when they do, patches are not made available quickly."

High-end smart phones are more likely to be configured to automatically install updates to protect against attacks, he says. Francillon believes that the vulnerabilities that Mulliner found on feature phones "may remain open for a very long time before they are corrected on end users' phones—if ever."

Car Theft by ANTENNAs?

Car thieves of the future might be able to get into a car and drive away without forced entry and without needing a physical key, according to new research that will be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium next month in San Diego, California. The researchers successfully attacked eight car manufacturers' passive keyless entry and start systems—wireless key fobs that open a car's doors and start the engine by proximity alone. Srdjan Capkun, an assistant professor of computer science in the system security group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, who led the work, says he was inspired to investigate the security of keyless entry and start systems after buying a car that had one. Capkun and Aurélien Francillon and Boris Danev, both researchers in the same institution, examined 10 car models from the eight manufacturers. They were able to access all 10 and drive them away by intercepting and relaying signals from the cars to their wireless keys. While they could relay the signals from the key back to the car as well, usually they did not need to because the key transmits its signals up to around 100 meters. The attack works no matter what cryptography and protocols the key and car use to communicate with each other. Normally, when a wireless key is within a few meters of the right car, it detects a low-powered signal that causes it to issue a command that opens the car enable the ignition. The researchers used a pair of antennas to transmit these signals from the car to the key when the key was farther away, tricking the car into opening without the ordinary authorization. One antenna needs to be very close to the car, and one needs to be within eight meters of the key. The researchers came up with two versions of the attack. In one, they ran a cable from near the car to near the key and used it to transmit the signals. They conducted the other wirelessly. Francillon says that the materials for the wired attack cost about $50, and those for the wireless attack cost between $100 and $1,000, depending on the electronic components used. The researchers tested a few scenarios. An attacker could watch a parking lot and have an accomplice watch as car owners as entered a nearby store. The accomplice would only need to be within eight meters of the targeted owner's key fob, making it easy to avoid arousing suspicion. In another scenario, a car owner might leave a car key on a table near a window. An antenna placed outside the house was able to communicate with the key, allowing the researchers then to start the car parked out front and drive away. A car won't open or start if the signal from its key takes too long to arrive, so the researchers devised a way to speed communication between their antennas. Most relay attacks require the signals to be converted from analog to digital and back, which takes time. The researchers were able to keep the signals in analog format, which reduced their delay from microseconds to nanoseconds and made their attack more difficult to detect. The researchers suggest things that car owners and manufacturers can do to protect themselves. Car owners can shield their keys when they're not in use, to prevent attackers from communicating with them. Alternatively, manufacturers could add a button to fobs that would allow owners to deactivate and reactivate them. Capkun worries, however, that these types of solutions detract from the convenience that makes passive keyless entry systems worthwhile. Ultimately, he says, manufacturers will need to add secure technology that allows the car to confirm that the key is in fact nearby. "I don't see a way around it," Capkun says. His group is actively working on protocols that would accomplish this. David Wagner, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied the cryptographic systems used in keyless entry systems, says the research "should help car manufacturers improve auto security systems in the future." Wagner doesn't think the research ought to make car owners anxious. "There are probably easier ways to steal cars," he says. But, he adds, a "nasty aspect of high-tech car theft" is that "it doesn't leave any sign of forced entry," so if a thief did use this method to steal a car, he says, it might be hard for police and insurance companies to get sufficient evidence of what happened. Wagner believes that manufacturers, police, and insurance companies all need to prepare for this eventuality. "Automobiles are a key example of a system that is pervasively computerized," so they need to be thoroughly examined to ensure they are secure, says Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Washington. Kohno helped form the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security, which is dedicated to identifying and solving security problems with car security systems before they cause problems in the real world.

Hackers find a new way to cheat on WALL STREET!

High-frequency trading networks, which complete stock market transactions in microseconds, are vulnerable to manipulation by hackers who can inject tiny amounts of latency into them. By doing so, they can subtly change the course of trading and pocket profits of millions of dollars in just a few seconds, says Rony Kay, a former IBM research fellow and founder of cPacket Networks, a Silicon Valley firm that develops chips and technologies for network monitoring and traffic analysis.

Kay, an Israeli-born computer scientist and one-time Intel engineering manager, says the root of the problem is the increasing speed of networks; as they get faster and faster, our ability to actually understand events taking place within them isn't keeping up. Network monitoring technology can detect perturbations in network traffic happening in milliseconds, but when changes occur in microseconds, they're not visible, he says.

cPacket has developed a proof of concept showing that these side-channel attacks can be used to create tiny delays in the transmission of market data and trades. By manipulating specific trading activities by several microseconds, an attacker could gain unfair trading advantage. And because the operation occurs outside the range of monitoring technology, it would remain invisible. "We believe that such techniques pose a substantial risk of creating unfair trading, if used by the wrong people," Kay says.

Latency threatens other applications as well

The lack of visibility into high-speed networks is of concern to more than the financial community. Managing traffic on today's 10Gbps and faster networks is becoming difficult, resulting in degradations of performance, particularly to virtualized systems. "It's difficult to take corrective actions when you can't really see what's taking place," Kay says. "If you cannot measure network latency, you cannot control it and cannot improve it."

In a PDF whitepaper on latency, Kay wrote, "Traditionally, applications that have latency requirements include: VoIP and interactive video conferencing, network gaming, high-performance computing, cloud computing, and automatic algorithmic trading. For example, one-way latency for VoIP telephony should generally not exceed 150 milliseconds (0.15 seconds) to enable good conversation quality, while interactive games typically require latencies between 100 and 1,000 milliseconds. However, the requirements for automated algorithmic trading are much more strict. A few extra milliseconds, or even a few extra microseconds, can enable trades to execute ahead of the competition, thereby increasing profits."

Indeed, latency, even at the very highest speeds, is so concerning that researchers at MIT recommended any organization dealing in complicated time-sensitive global interactions should take a hard look at where they locate their data centers.

The MIT researchers even suggested that financial firms could gain some advantage by taking advantage of limitations posed by the speed of light. For example, it typically takes about 50 milliseconds to send a message from New York to London. Placing a server between the two could cut the speed of communication in half, they said, which may be enough time to take advantage of some momentary pricing discrepancy. Trading on that discrepancy is known as arbitrage, and it's becoming increasingly common.

A side-channel attack on a high-frequency trading network is analogous to a denial-of-service attack. In a typical DoS attack, bots flood a target website with enormous numbers of hits, often causing a crash. A side-channel attack would be infinitely more subtle, but it would still function by adding extraneous packets to a legitimate data stream. Those extra packets slow the data just enough to give someone else a chance to move first in the market.

Quantum Hackers Use Lasers to Crack Powerful Encryption Without Leaving a Trace

Quantum cryptography is one of the most secure known means of transmitting data, due to the fact that even if a third party does intercept a quantum signal, that interference changes the encryption key, making the tampering apparent to parties at both ends. But a handful of quantum hackers at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim recently performed successful hacks of two commercial quantum cryptographic systems -- and they did so without leaving a trace. 



The quantum hackers got around the rules of quantum physics by simply intercepting the incoming signal and generating a brand new one to send on to the receiver. To do so, they shined a continuous 1-milliwatt laser at the receiver's detector, blinding it while they intercepted the sender's signal. 



You can check out the hackers' "how we did it" site.