Stealing Browsing History Using Your Phone’s Ambient Light Sensor

There has been a flurry of research into using the various sensors on your phone to steal data in surprising ways. Here’s another: using the phone’s ambient light sensor to detect what’s on the screen. It’s a proof of concept, but the paper’s general conclusions are correct: There is a lesson here that designing specifications and systems from a privacy… Continue reading Stealing Browsing History Using Your Phone’s Ambient Light Sensor→

Acoustic Attack Against Accelerometers

Interesting acoustic attack against the MEMS accelerometers in devices like FitBits. Millions of accelerometers reside inside smartphones, automobiles, medical devices, anti-theft devices, drones, IoT devices, and many other industrial and consumer applications. Our work investigates how analog acoustic injection attacks can damage the digital integrity of the capacitive MEMS accelerometer. Spoofing such sensors with intentional acoustic interference enables an out-of-spec… Continue reading Acoustic Attack Against Accelerometers→

What to Expect in 2017: Mobile Device Security

We are mobile, our devices are mobile, the networks we connect to are mobile and the applications we access are mobile. Mobility, in all its iterations, is a huge enabler and concern for enterprises and it’ll only get worse as we start wearing our connected clothing to the office. If the last 10 years wasn’t […] Continue reading What to Expect in 2017: Mobile Device Security→

UnifyID’s ingenious user authentication platform wins Innovation Sandbox Contest

A panel of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and large security companies selected UnifyID from a group of 10 finalists as the winner of the Innovation Sandbox Contest at RSA Conference 2017. The annual conference competition is a half-day program during which up-and-coming startups grab the spotlight and demonstrate groundbreaking security technologies to the broader RSA Conference community. Past winners include Sourcefire, Imperva and most recently Phantom. How does the UnifyID user authentication platform work? UnifyID is … More → Continue reading UnifyID’s ingenious user authentication platform wins Innovation Sandbox Contest→

TOBE: Tangible Out-of-Body Experience with Biosignals

TOBE is a toolkit that enables the user to create Tangible Out-of-Body Experiences, created by [Renaud Gervais] and others and presented at the TEI ’16: Tenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction. The goal is to expose the inner states of users using physiological signals such as heart rate or brain activity. The toolkit is a proposal that covers the creation of a 3D printed avatar where visual representations of physiological sensors (ECG, EDA, EEG, EOG and breathing monitor) are displayed, the creation and use of these sensors based on open hardware platforms such as Bitalino or OpenBCI, …read more

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Smart Sutures

Researchers at Tufts University are experimenting with smart thread sutures that could provide electronic feedback to recovering patients. The paper, entitled “A toolkit of thread-based microfluidics, sensors, and electronics for 3D tissue embedding for medical diagnosis”, is fairly academic, but does describe how threads can work as pH sensors, strain gauges, blood sugar monitors, temperature monitors, and more.

Conductive thread is nothing new but usually thought of as part of a smart garment. In this case, the threads close up wounds and are thus directly in the patient’s body. In many cases, the threads talked to an XBee LilyPad or …read more

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Enjoy The Last Throes of Summer With a Nice Pool Automation Project

[Ken Rumer] bought a new house. It came with a troublingly complex pool system. It had solar heating. It had gas heating. Electricity was involved somehow. It had timers and gadgets. Sand could be fed into one end and clean water came out the other. There was even a spa thrown into the mix.

Needless to say, within the first few months of owning their very own chemical plant they ran into some near meltdowns. They managed to heat the pool with 250 dollars of gas in a day. They managed to drain the spa entirely into the pool, but …read more

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