Lifeboat Foundation

An experiment, performed by Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRIM) on 200 km of the Italian Quantum Backbone, in collaboration with Toshiba Europe, shows that coherent laser interferometry considerably improves the performances of quantum key distribution protocols in long-distance, real-world networks. The study has been published in Nature Communications.

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocols enable cryptographic keys to be shared between distant parties with an intrinsic security guaranteed by the laws of quantum mechanics. This is made possible by the transmission of single photons, the elementary particles of which light is made of.

The interest for this subject extends well beyond the scientific community, and has now a strong strategic and commercial relevance. The European Commission, within the “European Quantum Communication Infrastructure” intitative, aims at integrating quantum key distribution technologies into specific services throughout the European Union within the next 10 years, and INRIM will take part in the design of this infrastructure with the OQTAVO project.

Cisco Systems has rolled out fixes for a critical security flaw affecting Redundancy Configuration Manager (RCM) for Cisco StarOS Software.

Google researchers detail two zero-day vulnerabilities reported in Zoom client software and MMR servers.

Google has finally rolled out an option on Android allowing users to disable 2G connections, which come with a host of privacy and security problems exploited by cell-site simulators.

The addition of the option was spotted by EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), which calls the development a victory for privacy protection.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to a tweet on Monday discussing the risk posed to him and his family by publishing details about his travel plans.

For enterprises that are looking to bring a zero trust approach as a way to better secure identities and permissions, leveraging advanced AI is now essential in order to achieve accuracy and scalability, ForgeRock CEO Fran Rosch told VentureBeat.

While traditionally, zero trust decision-making has relied mostly upon rules–for instance, rejecting a user request based on an impossible geographic location– ForgeRock adds in AI algorithms that enable far greater accuracy, Rosch said. This accuracy equates to dramatically enhanced security, he said–citing an example of a recent customer that increased its entitlement rejections by 300% after deploying ForgeRock.

“Because it was previously all done by these rules, and people were rubber-stamping these entitlement requests, they were letting these things go that they should never have approved,” Rosch said in a recent interview. “That was increasing the risk to the company. Because there were people who had no business accessing HR data, and no business accessing sales data, that were getting that information. So by leveraging the AI, a 300% increase in request rejections really tightened up the security of the organization.”

Continue reading “AI is the key to fixing identity security, ForgeRock CEO says” »

At first glance, Cui is depicted as a beautiful young professional in her 20s who joined Vanke’s accounting department in February 2021 and is the recipient of the company’s Best Newcomer Award. Cui has a 91.44 percent success rate in collecting overdue payments. In December 2021, Baixin Bank launched its first virtual employee named AIYA, and Jiangnan Rural Commercial Bank launched its VTM digital employees. Earlier in April 2019, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank introduced its first AI-powered digital employee named Xiaopu, capable of serving its bank users at different posts Notably, China’s first “meta-human” AYAYI made its debut on Chinese e-commerce platform Xiaohongshuin in May 2021. The hyper-realistic digital human garnered three million views on its first post.

According to a 2019 report compiled by Deloitte, a global professional services network, experts predict that using AI at a larger scale will add as much as $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030.Deloitte’s report shows that from 2015 to 2020, the average annual compound growth rate of the global artificial intelligence market was 26.2 percent, while the growth rate of the Chinese AI market during the same period was 44.5 percent. Another report by Deloitte suggests that in 2025 the scale of China’s artificial intelligence industry will exceed $85 billion.

Presently, there are about 2,600 artificial intelligence companies in China. Most located in Beijing’s Haidian District technology hub, The Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), a U.S. think tank, estimated the CCP’s total R&D investment in artificial intelligence in 2018 was between $2 billion and $8.4 billion.

Continue reading “Chinese Property Giant Said Its Employee of The Year Was Not a Human, But an AI Program” »

FSO communication systems are where free space acts as a communication channel between transceivers that are line-of-sight (LOS) for successful transmission of optical signals. The channel can be atmosphere, space, or vacuum, whose characteristics determine the transmission and reception of optical signals for designing reliable and efficient communication systems. Using FSO technology data is transmitted by propagation of light through atmospheric or space communication channels, allowing optical connectivity. FSO communication offers a high data rate to meet the tremendous increasing demand of broadband traffic mostly driven by Internet access and HDTV broadcasting services. Compared to fiber optics technology, FSO offers much more flexibility in designing optical network architectures at very high speeds, at tens and hundreds of Gbit/s rates. However, FSO communication is affected by atmospheric effects, which limits sensitivity and achievable data rates with acceptable BER. Some of these degradations are turbulence, absorption, and scattering, and various mitigation techniques exist for reliable and efficient data transmission [1] and to increase the communication performance. Both point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, multipoint-to-point, and multipoint-to-multipoint FSO communications are possible, depending on the different scenarios of establishing optical links. FSO communication is the most practical alternative to solve the bottleneck broadband connectivity problem. The data rates provided by FSO links continue to increase in both long-and short-range applications. FSO will be one of the most unique and powerful tools to address connectivity bottlenecks that have been created in high-speed networks during the past decade due to the tremendous success and continued acceptance of the Internet. The next generation of Internet connectivity will push the limits of existing infrastructure with high-bandwidth applications such as videoconferencing, streaming multimedia content, and network-enabled portable devices. Clearing these bottlenecks is crucial for the future growth and success of the contemporary Internet society. The bandwidth of optical communications access and edge networks will be needed to satisfy these demands. Communication systems are concerned with the transmission of information from a source to a user. The purpose of a communication system is therefore to transfer information. A very basic block diagram of any communication system (optical or radiofrequency (RF)) is shown in Fig. 4.1.

Fig. 4.1 shows a single point-to-point system, whereas in a multiplexed system there may be multiple input and output message sources and users (also called destinations). Fig. 4.2 shows other possible configurations and links for multipoint connections.

OWC is the next frontier for high-speed broadband connection and offers the following unique features and advantages: high bandwidth/capacity, ease of deployment, compact size, low power, and improved channel security. OWC can transmit and exchange voice and video communication data through the atmosphere/free-space at the rates of tens of Gbit/s and much more.

Continue reading “Free-Space Optical Communication” »

Microsoft has pulled the January Windows Server cumulative updates after critical bugs caused domain controllers to reboot, Hyper-V to not work, and ReFS volume systems to become unavailable.

Tuesday, Microsoft released the January 2022 Patch Tuesday updates for Windows Server that includes numerous security updates and bug fixes.

These updates are KB5009624 for Windows Server 2012 R2, KB5009557 for Windows Server 2019, and KB5009555 for Windows Server 2022.

Continue reading “Microsoft pulls new Windows Server updates due to critical bugs” »

A team of researchers at the Institute of Computer Science and Random Systems has built a non-software-based virus detection system using a Raspberry Pi, an H-field probe and an oscilloscope to detect electromagnetic wave signatures of multiple types of viruses. The team presented its system and test results at last month’s ACM Machinery’s Annual Computer Security Applications Conference and published a paper describing their system on ACM’s Research Article page.

The idea behind the new system is that running software generates electromagnetic waves. And each piece of software generates its own unique wave patterns due to the way the software executes its code. The researchers took advantage of this knowledge and began using an H-field probe to capture wave patterns of known computer viruses running on various devices and viewed the results on an oscilloscope. They saw oscilloscope patterns that were unique to individual viruses as they were running. The researchers used that information to program a Raspberry Pi to identify data from the other two devices to recognize known virus wave patterns, using the system as a virus detector. To determine if a virus is running on a computer, IoT device or smartphone, a user places the H-field probe close enough to the device to read the electromagnetic waves that are generated. The Raspberry Pi then reports on whether it found any viruses, and if so, which ones.