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Tag: Purdue University

  • New 5G Security Flaws Discovered, Threatening Privacy and Security

    New 5G Security Flaws Discovered, Threatening Privacy and Security

    Companies around the world are working to roll out 5G networks, facing regulatory, logistic, economic and technical hurdles along the way. Now, according to WIRED, researchers have discovered a number of new flaws in the specification, adding yet another challenge to successful deployment.

    Researchers from Purdue University and the University of Iowa have discovered 11 new flaws in 5G protocols. Alarmingly, these flaws are all part of the 5G specification itself, rather than any one carrier’s implementation. The vulnerabilities can “expose your location, downgrade your service to old mobile data networks, run up your wireless bills, or even track when you make calls, text, or browse the web. They also found five additional 5G vulnerabilities that carried over from 3G and 4G. They identified all of those flaws with a new custom tool called 5GReasoner.”

    Although one of the benefits of 5G is supposed to be greater protection of phone identifiers, such as the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI), so-called downgrade attacks bypass that security by forcing a device to operate in 4G mode, or a limited service mode. Once the service is downgraded, the device can be forced to send its IMSI. Even the safeguards that are in place, such as Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identity (TMSI), can be overridden.

    The researchers also discovered “issues with the part of the 5G standard that governs things like initial device registration, deregistration, and paging, which notifies your phone about incoming calls and texts.”

    The flaws have all been reported to the GSM Association, which downplayed the severity of the issue.

    “These scenarios have been judged as nil or low-impact in practice, but we appreciate the authors’ work to identify where the standard is written ambiguously, which may lead to clarifications in the future,” the GSMA told WIRED. “We are grateful to the researchers for affording industry the opportunity to consider their findings and welcome any research that enhances the security and user confidence of mobile services.”

  • Purdue University’s Invisibility Cloak Is Based On Time

    At least, that’s what the description from researchers based at Purdue University indicates. Yes, most of us have dreamed of becoming invisible, for whatever reason. Be it to pull off a master heist or disappear in the middle of a long work day, the idea of bending light like the Predator’s cloak is to produce an invisibility effect, it’s safe to say, something many people would want. It’s also a concept that usually resides mainly in our imaginations, no matter how technical the explanations may be. Normally, the idea of being completely translucent, allowing those who are hidden to fulfill many dark desires, is something best left to the Ralph Ellisons of the world.

    Thanks to those intrepid explorers at Purdue’s electrical engineering department, fiction may becoming a reality. At least, unless the department is just pulling our collective leg. Before that, however, an explanation of their idea:

    Purdue professor Andrew M Weiner has said, “A lot of people have seen the invisibility cloak in the Harry Potter movies. In scientific research terms that is a spatial cloak. What we’ve done involves time cloaking… Time cloaking is relatively new. It’s based on the idea that there are places in time where if something were to happen it wouldn’t be picked up, so no one can tell that it has occurred… Say you have a light beam. Speed up the front half and slow down the back half, and you create a place where the light beam splits apart. There is no light intensity there… If you send a piece of data, but the light beam isn’t there, you can’t make the record. So if someone depicts the absence of light they will think no data was sent.”

    From my admittedly far less advanced perspective, it sounds like they are using, well, darkness to produce an invisibility field around the object they are trying to cloak. Or, as the YouTube crowd so eloquently put it:

    of course it uses time the later it gets the darker it is to see things and then it becomes invisible

    – snava360z334

    And if you actually watch the video leading this post, it almost looks like it was a time-lapse of a rock sitting in a room that proceeds to get darker. Clearly, in this case, the simplest explanation is not the correct interpretation.

  • Purdue University Professor Fixes Major Flaw In 3D Printing

    3D printing has come a long way since its humble roots over 20 years ago. The technology has become affordable and people are starting to make some really awesome objects with the technology. Unfortunately, it’s still hampered by a few setbacks. A major flaw is that some objects just don’t have the strength to stay together.

    Purdue University professor Bedrich Benes knows how fragile some 3D printed objects can be. He claims to have a “zoo” of broken 3D printed objects strewn about his office. His newest project aims to create new 3D printing software that can find points of stress in an object before it heads to the 3D printer. The software is being co-developed by Benes and Adobe’s Advanced Technology Labs.

    The new software isn’t only about making 3D printed structures stronger. Benes says that his software can cut down on weight and cost by 80 percent. It does, however, have one caveat – precision. The software’s main focus is structural stability. Benes says that 3D printing can sacrifice precision in the name of stability. Your 3D printed object can have a precise shape, but it’s still worthless if it falls apart.

    For now, the software can only detect grip points on an object and strengthen those parts. I can see this software evolving in the future alongside other 3D printing projects, like housing. It could detect stress points on a house and fix them in the planning stages before the construction begins.

    3D printing is becoming more prominent in all of our lives. We need to have software like this to make sure things don’t break where we need them most. A small plastic figurine is fine if it breaks, but it would be a problem if a 3D printed satellite were to break.