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Category: computing – Page 23

XRP analysis: Ripple is preparing XRP Ledger for quantum computers before ‘QDay’ arrives

An Anthropic model cut the work needed to break a leading post-quantum signature candidate by a factor of 67 million last month, while Bitcoin and Ethereum published their own migration plans this week.

New transistor brings high voltage to microchip scale

Inside every electronic device, the flow of electricity is controlled by a switch called a transistor. For decades, these switches were made from silicon. More recently, engineers have turned to a material called gallium nitride (GaN), which enables small, efficient devices like smartphone chargers.

However, at very high voltages, electric fields inside these transistors can concentrate at specific points, causing them to fail prematurely. As a result, today’s GaN devices still struggle to perform at the highest voltage levels achieved by silicon.

To overcome this limitation, researchers in the Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Lab (POWERlab) in EPFL’s School of Engineering have introduced a new class of GaN transistor: the intrinsic polarization superjunction, or iPSJ.

Attackers Chain Two PaperCut Flaws to Execute Code Without Authentication

The development comes after PaperCut released a second emergency patch that it said includes “additional hardening beyond the original emergency patch.” The Australian company has yet to share details about the nature of the malicious activity weaponizing the flaws.

“At this time, we don’t have enough evidence to determine the threat actors’ ultimate end goal,” John Hammond, senior principal security researcher at Huntress, told The Hacker News. “Based on what we observed, the activity appears consistent with early-stage reconnaissance or validation, including commands to identify the victim’s user account and operating system.”

According to preemptive exposure management firm watchTowr, attackers are chaining together both vulnerabilities to bypass authentication and gain remote code execution on affected instances.

Nanoscale transistors achieve lower contact resistance with stepwise evaporation method

Metals, semiconductors and insulators are fundamental components of modern electronics. However, efforts to improve device performance have largely focused on semiconductor quality, while metal crystallinity has received far less attention.

As transistor dimensions continue to shrink, though, structural disorder in metals and at metal-semiconductor interfaces increasingly impedes carrier injection and transport. Metals therefore need a level of structural order comparable to that of single-crystal semiconductors to push device performance toward its physical limits.

To solve this problem, a research team led by Chu Junhao at the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics (SITP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has developed an atomic-scale stepwise evaporation method called Step-Eva that enables the direct in situ growth of single-crystal metal films on semiconductors. This process greatly reduces contact resistance and potentially redefines how transistors are built at the nanoscale.

Next.js Patches Critical AVIF and Windows Flaws Enabling Unauthenticated RCE

Vercel has released security patches for two critical-severity vulnerabilities in the Next.js web framework, both of which allow unauthenticated remote code execution, one exploitable via specially crafted AVIF image files and the other through a path traversal flaw affecting servers that use a Windows filesystem.

The Windows path traversal, tracked as CVE-2026–75604 (CVSS score: 9.0), affects Next.js applications that use both the Pages Router and App Router without Cache Components when the server uses a Windows filesystem.

Linux and macOS deployments are not affected.