Lifeboat Foundation

Athletes headed to the Beijing Olympic Winter Games are making final travel preparations, including keeping in line with China’s health measures on the “My 2022″ smartphone app. However, inadequate encryption measures within the app can leave Olympians, journalists and sports officials vulnerable to hackers, privacy breaches, and surveillance, according to a cybersecurity report by the Citizen Lab obtained exclusively by DW. Additionally, the IT forensic specialists found that the app includes a censorship keyword list. The findings come as international concern over digital safety at the Games mounts. Germany, Australia, UK and US have urged their athletes and National Olympic Committees to leave their personal phones and laptops behind and to travel with special devices over fears of digital espionage. The Dutch Olympic Committee outright banned its athletes from bringing personal phones and laptops due to surveillance concerns.

In the Olympic Playbook for athletes and team officials, the International Olympic Committee states that the “My 2022″ app is “in accordance with international standards and Chinese law.” But based on its findings, Citizen Lab concludes that the insecure transmission of personal information “may constitute a direct violation of China’s privacy laws.” This is because China’s data protection laws require that a person’s health and medical records held digitally be transmitted and stored in an encrypted manner. Citizen Lab’s findings also raise questions concerning two Western tech giants that carry the “My 2022″ app: Apple and Google. “Both Apple’s and Google’s policies forbid apps to transmit sensitive data without proper encryption, so Apple and Google will need to determine whether the app’s unresolved vulnerabilities warrant delisting,” Citizen Lab’s Knockel told DW. The Beijing Organizing Committee has stood by its app, however, saying it “passed the examination” of international mobile application markets such as Google, Apple and Samsung.“We have taken measures such as personal information encryption in the app to ensure privacy security,” the committee said Monday to Xinhua News Agency.

Continue reading “Hacking backdoor? Security flaws in China’s mandatory Olympics app | DW News” »

Three resonators operating at different frequencies read a 3×3 matrix of quantum dots. © 2022 EPFL

Biochemistry and cryptography.

The 41-year-old computing method can decode encrypted messages and help detect hidden military vehicles such as stealth aircraft.

James McKenzie is excited about the prospects of firms that are developing technology based on seemingly esoteric fundamental quantum phenomena.

Physicists have long boasted of their success in what’s known as “quantum 1.0” technology – semiconductor junctions, transistors, lasers and so on. Thanks to their efforts over the last 75 years, we have smart phones, computers, laptops and other quantum-enabled devices that have transformed our lives. But the future will increasingly depend on “quantum 2.0” technology, which taps into phenomena like superposition and entanglement to permit everything from quantum computing and cryptography to quantum sensing, timing and imaging.

The incredible possibilities of quantum 2.0 were brought home to me when I attended the UK’s National Quantum Technologies Showcase in central London last month. The event featured more than 60 exhibitors and I was amazed how far things have progressed. In fact, it coincided with two positive developments. One was an announcement by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) of a further £50m to support quantum industrial projects. The other was the UK and US signing a joint “statement of intent” to boost collaboration on quantum science and technologies.

Continue reading “Towards quantum 2.0 technology: where the best opportunities for business lie” »

While they wrestle with the immediate danger posed by hackers today, US government officials are preparing for another, longer-term threat: attackers who are collecting sensitive, encrypted data now in the hope that they’ll be able to unlock it at some point in the future.

The threat comes from quantum computers, which work very differently from the classical computers we use today. Instead of the traditional bits made of 1s and 0s, they use quantum bits that can represent different values at the same time. The complexity of quantum computers could make them much faster at certain tasks, allowing them to solve problems that remain practically impossible for modern machines—including breaking many of the encryption algorithms currently used to protect sensitive data such as personal, trade, and state secrets.

While quantum computers are still in their infancy, incredibly expensive and fraught with problems, officials say efforts to protect the country from this long-term danger need to begin right now.

Continue reading “The US is worried that hackers are stealing data today so quantum computers can crack it in a decade” »

This week, Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) kicked off its tenth re: Invent conference, an event where it typically announces the biggest changes in the cloud computing industry’s dominant platform. This year’s news includes faster chips, more aggressive artificial intelligence, more developer-friendly tools, and even a bit of quantum computing for those who want to explore its ever-growing potential.

Amazon is working to lower costs by boosting the performance of its hardware. Their new generation of machines powered by the third generation of AMD’s EPYC processors, the M6a, is touted as offering a 35% boost in price/performance over the previous generation of M5a machines built with the second generation of the EPYC chips. They’ll be available in sizes that range from two virtual CPUs with 8GB of RAM (m6a.large) up to 192 virtual CPUs and 768GB of RAM (m6a.48xlarge).

AWS also notes that the chips will boast “always-on memory encryption” and rely on faster custom circuitry for faster encryption and decryption. The feature is a nod to users who worry about sharing hardware in the cloud and, perhaps, exposing their data.

Continue reading “AWS re: Invent: Faster chips, smarter AI, and developer tools grab the spotlight” »

Analysts at Booz Allen Hamilton warn that Chinese espionage efforts could soon focus on encrypted data.

Using a focused laser beam, scientists can manipulate properties of nanomaterials, thus ‘writing’ information onto monolayer materials. By this means, the thinnest light disk at atomic level was demonstrated.

The bottleneck in atomic-scale data storage area may be broken by a simple technique, thanks to recent innovative studies conducted by scientists from Nanjing Normal University (NJNU) and Southeast University (SEU).

Through a simple, efficient and low-cost technique involving the focused laser beam and ozone treatment, the NJNU and SEU research teams, leading by Prof. Hongwei Liu, Prof. Junpeng Lu and Prof. Zhenhua Ni demonstrated that the photoluminescence (PL) emission of WS₂ monolayers can be controlled and modified, and consequently, it works as the thinnest light disk with rewritable data storage and encryption capability.

Cryptography theorists are completely reimagining the PIN system to try to better protect you.