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Events That Never Happened Could Influence the 2024 Presidential Election – a Cybersecurity Researcher Explains Situation Deepfakes
The basic idea and technology of a situation deepfake are the same as with any other deepfake, but with a bolder ambition: to manipulate a real event or invent one from thin air. Situation deepfakes have already been used in recent weeks – the first in a Republican National Committee’s ad against President Joe Biden, the second in an anti-Trump ad by Ron DeSantis’s campaign.
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Bolstering Cyber Safety on Roads and Highways
A new research center is helping prevent potential cyberattacks that could threaten to impede the safe and efficient movement of people and goods in the United States and throughout the world.
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Satellite Security Lags Decades Behind the State of the Art
Thousands of satellites are currently orbiting the Earth, and there will be many more in the future. Researchers analyzed three current low-earth orbit satellites and found that, from a technical point of view, hardly any modern security concepts were implemented. Various security mechanisms that are standard in modern mobile phones and laptops were not to be found.
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Addressing the Existential Threats from Artificial Intelligence
While the recent advancements in commercial AI can be disorienting and the claims of existential risks made by different groups of AI researchers can be terrifying, policymakers could respond with steps toward ensuring that AI is safely deployed.
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How an “AI-tocracy” Emerges
Many scholars, analysts, and other observers have suggested that resistance to innovation is an Achilles’ heel of authoritarian regimes. But in China, the use of AI-driven facial recognition helps the regime repress dissent while enhancing the technology, researchers report.
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Software System Finds, Tracks Moving Objects as Small as a Pixel
A new patented software system developed at Sandia can find the curves of motion in streaming video and images from satellites, drones and far-range security cameras and turn them into signals to find and track moving objects as small as one pixel. The developers say this system can enhance the performance of any remote sensing application.
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Radar Can Help Fight Wildfires, Identify Flash-Flood Risks
Radar imaging technology can provide valuable insight into the location and extent of wildfires in remote Arctic and Subarctic forests, like those currently burning in Canada. Capable of penetrating clouds and smoke, and imaging day and night, Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) can play a critical role in wildfire monitoring.
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Next-Generation Flow Battery Design Sets Records
Sugar additive plays a surprising role, boosting flow battery capacity and longevity for this grid energy resilience design. Researchers report that the flow battery, a design optimized for electrical grid energy storage, maintained its capacity to store and release energy for more than a year of continuous charge and discharge.
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Forensics Lab Cracks Case on Newer, “Greener” Gunshot Residue
Discoveries by forensic scientists about how gunshot residue behaves on skin, hair and fabric will allow crime scene investigators to catch up to the proliferation of new, eco-friendly types of ammunition and make faster, more informed decisions at crime scenes and in forensic laboratories.
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What Are the Odds of a Truly Catastrophic, Even Extinction-Causing, Disaster?
The Forecastong Research Institute (FRI) brought together forecasters from two groups with distinctive claims to knowledge about humanity’s future — experts in various domains relevant to existential risk, and “superforecasters” with a track record of predictive accuracy over short time horizons. FRI asked tournament participants to predict the likelihood of global risks related to nuclear weapon use, biorisks, and AI, along with dozens of other related, shorter-run forecasts.
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A Quantitative Analysis of the In-Orbit Collision Risk and Its Effects on the Earth
Since the launch of the first satellite in 1957, the proliferation of space debris has continued unabated. The European Space Agency (ESA) estimates that over 131 million useless objects, ranging from 1 millimeter to 10 centimeters in size, currently orbit the Earth at an average speed of 36,000 kilometers per hour. “Any fragment larger than 1 centimeter poses a potentially lethal threat in the event of a collision,” says an expert.
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Sooner Than You Might Think: Virtual Power Plants Are Coming to Save the Grid
Networks of thousands of home-based batteries could be key to a cleaner, more reliable electricity system. After years of pilot projects, utilities and battery companies now have networks with thousands of participants in California, Utah, and Vermont, among others.
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Researchers Devise a Way to Evaluate Cybersecurity Methods
A savvy hacker can obtain secret information, such as a password, by observing a computer program’s behavior, like how much time that program spends accessing the computer’s memory. Security approaches that completely block these “side-channel attacks” are so computationally expensive, so engineers often apply what are known as obfuscation schemes. MIT researchers have developed a system which analyzes the likelihood that an attacker could thwart a certain security scheme to steal secret information.
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How Secure Are Voice Authentication Systems Really?
Voice authentication has increasingly been used in remote banking, call centers and other security-critical scenarios. Attackers can break voice authentication with up to 99 percent success within six tries.
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Energy Transition with Hydrogen Generated on Rooftops
Efficient production of hydrogen, fuels, and even drinking water on roofs or in solar parks – this is what researchers want to achieve with low-cost photoreactor modules. Now, they have made major progress.
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More headlines
The long view
Autonomous Vehicle Technology Vulnerable to Road Object Spoofing and Vanishing Attacks
Researchers have demonstrated the potentially hazardous vulnerabilities associated with the technology called LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, many autonomous vehicles use to navigate streets, roads and highways. The researchers have shown how to use lasers to fool LiDAR into “seeing” objects that are not present and missing those that are – deficiencies that can cause unwarranted and unsafe braking or collisions.
Tantalizing Method to Study Cyberdeterrence
Tantalus is unlike most war games because it is experimental instead of experiential — the immersive game differs by overlapping scientific rigor and quantitative assessment methods with the experimental sciences, and experimental war gaming provides insightful data for real-world cyberattacks.
Prototype Self-Service Screening System Unveiled
TSA and DHS S&T unveiled a prototype checkpoint technology, the self-service screening system, at Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) in Las Vegas, NV. The aim is to provide a near self-sufficient passenger screening process while enabling passengers to directly receive on-person alarm information and allow for the passenger self-resolution of those alarms.
Falling Space Debris: How High Is the Risk I'll Get Hit?
An International Space Station battery fell back to Earth and, luckily, splashed down harmlessly in the Atlantic. Should we have worried? Space debris reenters our atmosphere every week.
Testing Cutting-Edge Counter-Drone Technology
Drones have many positive applications, bad actors can use them for nefarious purposes. Two recent field demonstrations brought government, academia, and industry together to evaluate innovative counter-unmanned aircraft systems.
Strengthening the Grid’s ‘Backbone’ with Hydropower
Argonne-led studies investigate how hydropower could help add more clean energy to the grid, how it generates value as grids add more renewable energy, and how liner technology can improve hydropower efficiency.
The Tech Apocalypse Panic is Driven by AI Boosters, Military Tacticians, and Movies
From popular films like a War Games or The Terminator to a U.S. State Department-commissioned report on the security risk of weaponized AI, there has been a tremendous amount of hand wringing and nervousness about how so-called artificial intelligence might end up destroying the world. There is one easy way to avoid a lot of this and prevent a self-inflicted doomsday: don’t give computers the capability to launch devastating weapons.
The Tech Apocalypse Panic is Driven by AI Boosters, Military Tacticians, and Movies
From popular films like a War Games or The Terminator to a U.S. State Department-commissioned report on the security risk of weaponized AI, there has been a tremendous amount of hand wringing and nervousness about how so-called artificial intelligence might end up destroying the world. There is one easy way to avoid a lot of this and prevent a self-inflicted doomsday: don’t give computers the capability to launch devastating weapons.