FutureWatch - Brain Eavesdropping

On Monday, scientists from the University of Texas, Austin, made another step in that direction. In a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the researchers described an A.I. that could translate the private thoughts of human subjects by analyzing fMRI scans, which measure the flow of blood to different regions in the brain...

In the study, it was able to turn a person’s imagined speech into actual speech and, when subjects were shown silent films, it could generate relatively accurate descriptions of what was happening onscreen. more

ChatGPT Corporate Secrets: Not Made for Each Other

‘ChatGPT Corporate Secrets’ — doesn’t seem to be a healthy combination at all, as the clouds of data breach threats continue to loom large over the brave new world of AI chatbots...

For the uninitiated, this is not the first time that ChatGPT has created a controversy... But this time, the concern is quite grave for businesses, as ChatGPT might expose customer information and trade secrets. There have already been a few cases, enough to raise the alarm bell and send shockwaves across the tech world.

Let’s delve deeper with the story and figure out the important aspects about the Chatbot corporate espionage...

Team8, which happens to be an Israel-based venture firm, has recently published a shell-shocking report which argues that over-exposure to generative AI tools like ChatGPT can cause major problems to businesses by revealing corporate secrets and user data. more

Researchers Shrink Camera to the Size of a Salt Grain

Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have developed an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The system relies on a technology called a metasurface, which is studded with 1.6 million cylindrical posts and can be produced much like a computer chip. Image courtesy of the researchers.

Micro-sized cameras have great potential to spot problems in the human body and enable sensing for super-small robots, but past approaches captured fuzzy, distorted images with limited fields of view.

Now, researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have overcome these obstacles with an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The new system can produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional compound camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume... more

A New National Cybersecurity Strategy

State-sponsored cyberattacks and corporate espionage are becoming a bigger concern with each passing year, often resulting in millions of dollars in damages. Attackers are making off with critical data as governments, businesses, and cybersecurity experts struggle to protect citizens and customers. As of now, individuals and small businesses are on their own when attacked, but the Biden administration wants to change that and make multibillion dollar tech firms more accountable for Americans' digital safety.

The White House on Thursday unveiled a new National Cybersecurity Strategy to make cyberspace more secure for Americans. The new policy puts the onus on tech firms and large organizations to make their systems more secure, so that they are better able to resist the increasingly more sophisticated cybersecurity threats from around the world.

Explaining its stance, the Biden administration said that the "organizations that are most capable and best-positioned to reduce risks" should do more to ensure the online safety of American citizens rather than shifting the burden of cybersecurity to individuals, small businesses, and local governments. more

My 2012 cunning plan to really protect sensitive information may be catching on... 

"Impose a legal responsibility to proactively protect National Interest Assets. Hold the corporate caretakers of our economic future accountable for protecting their valuables. Create standards of protection. Provide penalties for inadequate or negligent protection. Enforce compliance before the theft occurs."

Patent: Adding a Camera to the Apple Watch

Apple was granted a new patent for a detachable watch-based camera retention system...

This new strap-based system is hardly Apple's first attempt at patenting watch-based camera functionality. In 2019, the company was awarded US-10331083-B1 for a watch band with an integrated, flexible optical sensor. If made available, this rotatable camera would allowing photos to be taken without the need to remove the watch from the user's wrist...

While a high-quality embedded camera could have practical use for some, it does raise potential privacy and security concerns for others.

The ability to capture photos covertly by removing the need for a larger, handheld camera or phone opens the door to anything from secret, unauthorized, and compromising photos to increased risk of corporate espionage. 

The embedded cameras would require a new level of security and awareness to ensure they were not improperly used in areas such as schools, locker rooms, restrooms, or in areas where confidential documents and information are at risk of being captured. more

The Lasers are Coming - Killer Eyeglasses & Drones

For years, movies have teased us with the possibilities of augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR), from Minority Report to Iron Man. But unlike robotic insects and flying suits, AR and MR smart glasses are much closer to reality for everyday consumers. One of the major barriers has been consumers’ desire for lightweight smart glasses that resemble standard eyeglasses and can be worn all day, every day. Compact, chic designs require projection technology and batteries that are as small and power-efficient as possible, which has been difficult to achieve. The internet hype that AR glasses are just around the corner has given into the reality that there are a number of large problems to solve before mass deployment in the consumer space can begin. more

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Aerial drones are essentially the new improvised explosive devices (IEDs)—they’re relatively cheap and easily weaponized. Weaponized swarms of drones working together on a mission are an asymmetric threat that can quickly turn into an ugly situation. In the future, drones are expected to become faster, more autonomous, more difficult to detect or jam, and deadlier, with more sophisticated swarm attacks.

An arms race of sorts is quietly underway to be able to counter any countermeasures against drones. So the U.S. military is adopting a multilayered counter-drone approach to deal primarily with small drones (classified as Groups 1 and 2)—including commercial ones you can easily buy online and ones with fixed wings that look like tiny airplanes. Pinpoint accuracy at the speed of light makes high-energy lasers, a form of directed energy, one of the most promising options. more

FutureWatch: More Progress on the Electronic Dog Nose - TSCM Potential

Recap #1: Device can detect distress signals from plants that are harmed, under attack It turns out the best way to hear a plant scream is to smell it. (10/17/2008) more

Recap #2: Specially trained dogs have been used to sniff out covert electronic items, like cell phones in prisons, for quite a while now. The secret to detection is the device's electronic circuit boards. They contain these compounds: triphenylphosphine oxide (TPPO) and hydroxycyclohexyl phenyl ketone (HPK). This second compound is also found on CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, the old tech floppy disks. (5/18/2021) more

The latest development:
Researchers use biomimicry to enhance particle detection 16-fold by sniffing like dogs. more

FutureWatch: Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM) professionals have many types of technologies at their disposal for detecting illegal electronic surveillance devices. To name a few... Non-Linear Junction Detection, Infrared Thermography, and Radio-frequency Spectrum Analysis. We are now well on our way to adding EDN to our kit.

Sensors Tap Into Mobile Vibrations to Eavesdrop Remotely

Using an off-the-shelf automotive radar sensor and a novel processing approach, Penn State researchers demonstrated they could detect the vibrations of a cell phone's earpiece and decipher what the person on the other side of the call was saying with up to 83% accuracy...

The radar operates in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum, specifically in the bands of 60 to 64 gigahertz and 77 to 81 gigahertz, which inspired the researchers to name their approach "mmSpy." This is a subset of the radio spectrum used for 5G, the fifth-generation standard for communication systems across the globe.

In the mmSpy demonstration, the researchers simulated people speaking through the earpiece of a smartphone. The brand is irrelevant, Basak said, but the researchers tested their approach on both a Google Pixel 4a and a Samsung Galaxy S20. The phone's earpiece vibrates from the speech, and that vibration permeates across the body of the phone.

"We use the radar to sense this vibration and reconstruct what was said by the person on the other side of the line," Basak said, noting that their approach works even when the audio is completely inaudible to both humans and microphones nearby. more

This paper presents a system mmSpy that shows the feasibility of eavesdropping phone calls remotely. Towards this end, mmSpy performs sensing of earpiece vibrations using an off-the-shelf radar device that operates in the mmWave spectrum (77GHz, and 60GHz). abstract

New Spy Show Is An Experimental TV First

The Russo brothers have developed an international spy show called Citadel, and the series is expected to be a first-of-its-kind, world-building endeavor. 

Backed by Amazon Studios, the seven-episode saga features Priyanka Chopra Jonas and former Game of Thrones star Richard Madden alongside veteran actor Stanley Tucci. 

Citadel has been in the works for several years, but the series' release date has yet to be announced... The plot is also being kept under close guard. more

FutureWatch: Preventing Microphones from Capturing a Target Speaker’s Voice

Over the decades, there have been many attempts at preventing electronic eavesdropping. The most popular methods employ "white noise" sound masking and ultrasonic jamming. These techniques are aimed at nullifying microphones. While these techniques have their pros and cons, they all share one trait. They target all sounds to all microphones in the area. Not helpful if only one person desires privacy while allowing others to continue communicating using their smartphones, Internet-of Things devices, or hearing aids.

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University is working on a solution...

We propose NEC (Neural Enhanced Cancellation), a defense mechanism, which prevents unauthorized microphones from capturing a target speaker’s voice. Compared with the existing scrambling-based audio cancellation approaches, NEC can selectively remove a target speaker’s voice from a mixed speech without causing interference to others. ...The results show that NEC effectively mutes the target speaker at a microphone without interfering with other users’ normal conversations. more

Walmart Patents Technology to Eavesdrop on Workers

In the latest piece of evidence that we’re living squarely in a dystopia, Walmart has won a patent for technology that will allow bosses to eavesdrop on their workers. 

The audio surveillance technology can measure workers’ performance and listen to their conversations with customers at checkout. The “listening to the frontend” technology, as its called, might never be used—it’s one of many patents the company has applied for in recent years—but shows that company bosses are thinking about how they can use tech to monitor their workers. 

Walmart said in a statement: “We’re always thinking about new concepts and ways that will help us further enhance how we serve customers... more

FutureWatch: An App to Find Wi-Fi Spycams & More

Hidden IoT devices are increasingly being used to snoop on users in hotel rooms or AirBnBs. We envision empowering users entering such unfamiliar environments to identify and locate (e.g., hidden camera behind plants) diverse hidden devices (e.g., cameras, microphones, speakers) using only their personal handhelds.

Imagine a user walking into an unfamiliar environment such as a hotel room or Airbnb. Nowadays, the user has to be wary of wireless Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices being used to spy on them. These devices could be installed by the owner or by a previous guest. This threat is not just hypothetical...

...we want to empower users so that as they enter an unfamiliar space, they can run an app on their personal handheld (e.g., phone or tablet). This app would report a list of detected and identified devices and their corresponding locations. 

“Detect,” here, means knowing that there is some device (i.e., binary notification), “identify” entails knowing what type of device it is (e.g., type=camera), and “localize” entails knowing the device’s location in the physical space (e.g., behind the plants). While cameras in particular are imminent privacy threats, in general we want to detect/identify and localize diverse hidden IoT devices, as these could also be potential threats for tracking users. more

Researchers Develop Anti-Eavesdropping Algorithm for Smartphone Mics

At Columbia University, a team of researchers has successfully created a program that can block out audio spying through microphones found in smartphones and connected audio devices that require voice use.

This algorithm works by using predictive voice technology: that is, it can recognize human speech and instinctively generate audible background noise like muffling or whispers in order to camouflage the user’s words.

The technology works in real-time as the algorithm is able to create the obstruction while a person is speaking to a voice-controlled device or conversing with a friend.

But why create such an algorithm in the first place?

The problem stems from advertiser eavesdropping. While this is an issue that has not been proved or disproved, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that backs it up. more

New Countermeasure Against Unwanted Wireless Surveillance

Smart devices are supposed to make our everyday lives easier. At the same time, however, they are a gateway for passive eavesdropping. 

To prevent possible surveillance of the movement profile within one’s home, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the Cologne University of Applied Sciences have developed a novel system for protecting privacy in wireless communication.

Almost all Internet-of-Things devices, such as voice assistants, locks and cameras, rely on wireless connections based on high-frequency radio signals... passive eavesdroppers can still exploit sensitive information from intercepted radio frequency signals... Attackers can perceive such effects from a distance and, by applying simple statistical methods, conclude, for example, that a person is currently moving in the monitored room... this method known as “adversarial wireless sensing”...

With their approach, the researchers are the first in the world to propose IRS as a practical countermeasure against passive wireless eavesdropping attacks. more

Your Password-less Future

Apple, Google, and Microsoft announce support for passwordless sign-in...

In celebration of 2022 Word Password Day, Apple, Google and Microsoft announced plans to expand support for a sign-in standard from the FIDO alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that aims to eliminate passwords altogether.

The passwordless sign-in involves the use of a FIDO credential called passkey, which is stored on a phone. When signing into a website, users would need to have their phone nearby, as they will have to unlock it for access.

“Once you’ve done this, you won’t need your phone again and you can sign in by just unlocking your computer. Even if you lose your phone, your passkeys will securely sync to your new phone from cloud backup, allowing you to pick up right where your old device left off,” Google explains. more

New Algorithm to Shield Conversations from Eavesdropping AI

The thought that our gadgets are spying on us isn't a pleasant one, which is why a group of Columbia University researchers have created what they call "neural voice camouflage." 

This technology won't necessarily stop a human listener from understanding someone if they're snooping (you can give recordings a listen and view the source code at the link above). Rather, this is a system designed to stop devices equipped with microphones from transmitting automatically transcribed recordings. It's quiet – just above a whisper – but can generate sound specifically modeled to obscure speech in real time so that conversations can't be transcribed by software and acted upon or the text sent back to some remote server for processing...

According to Vondrick, the algorithm his team developed can stop a microphone-equipped AI model from interpreting speech 80 percent of the time, all without having to hear a whole recording, or knowing anything about the gadget doing the listening. more

FutureWatch: Yet Another World's Smallest Camera

Micro-sized cameras have great potential to spot problems in the human body and enable sensing for super-small robots, but past approaches captured fuzzy, distorted images with limited fields of view.

Now, researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have overcome these obstacles with an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The new system can produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional compound camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume, the researchers reported in a paper published Nov. 29 in Nature Communications... 

Heide (Felix Heide, the study's senior author and an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton) and his colleagues are now working to add more computational abilities to the camera itself. Beyond optimizing image quality, they would like to add capabilities for object detection and other sensing modalities relevant for medicine and robotics.

Heide also envisions using ultracompact imagers to create "surfaces as sensors." "We could turn individual surfaces into cameras that have ultra-high resolution, so you wouldn't need three cameras on the back of your phone anymore, but the whole back of your phone would become one giant camera. We can think of completely different ways to build devices in the future," he said. more

FutureWatch - Spycam Detection using Phone Time-of-Flight Sensors

via theregister.com
"Sriram Sami, Bangjie Sun, and Sean Rui Xiang Tan, from National University of Singapore, and Jun Han from Yonsei University, describe how this might be done in a paper [PDF] titled "LAPD: Hidden Spy Camera Detection using Smartphone Time-of-Flight Sensors"... 

...smartphones are commonplace these days, so adding an app like LAPD is likely to be more convenient than carrying a dedicated bug or signal detector at all times. LAPD's goal is to be accessible, usable, and accurate, and to judge by the results reported in the paper, it hits those marks...

"The 'attackers' have all the power to place hidden cameras anywhere, and the public is, in contrast, generally defenseless," he explained. "That's why we're doing this work, and why we hope hidden camera detection can become more commonplace." Sami said he intends to release the source code for LAPD but has to coordinate that with his colleagues." more

New Holographic Camera Can See Around Corners – Or Inside Your Skull

It sounds like something out of Star Trek: the doctor aims a camera at your chest, and a computer generates a hologram of your heart and blood vessels. She enlarges the image and takes a look at some of your smallest capillaries, each beautifully rendered in sub-millimeter detail. 

But thanks to a team at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, that may soon be a reality. They’ve created a prototype technology capable of seeing around corners and through everything from fog to the human skull. Their results are published in the journal Nature Communications...

“Our technology will usher in a new wave of imaging capabilities,” he said. “Our current sensor prototypes use visible or infrared light, but the principle is universal and could be extended to other wavelengths. For example, the same method could be applied to radio waves for space exploration or underwater acoustic imaging.”...

“It’s like we can plant a virtual computational camera on every remote surface to see the world from the surface’s perspective,” explained Florian Willomitzer, first author of the study. “This technique turns walls into mirrors.”...

“It can be applied to many areas, and we have only scratched the surface,” he added. more

Just think of the benefits to the CIA... 
and eventually the trickle down to corporate espionage types.

 

Urban Drone Detection is Due to Become Easier Thanks to 5G

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program awarded $750,000 to Texas-based small business Cobalt Solutions Inc. to develop a detection and tracking sensor system that can identify nefarious small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in an urban environment...

“Cobalt’s technology increases the number of exploitable drone signatures for detection and tracking,” said Dr. Jeff Randorf, DHS S&T engineering advisor and SBIR topic manager. “As more 5G mmWave transceivers are deployed in city centers, the ability to detect and track drones in complex urban geometries becomes easier, while not contributing to an already crowded radio frequency spectrum.” more