Lifeboat Foundation

Quantum computing will break most of the encryption schemes on which we rely today. These five tips will help you get ready.

Search on the phrase “quantum computing,” and you’ll find a furious debate. On the one hand, you’ll read breathless articles predicting groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence, genomics, economics, and pretty much every field under the sun. On the other, you’ll find the naysayers: It’s all hype. Large-scale quantum computers are still decades away — if they’re possible at all. Even if they arrive, they won’t be much faster than standard computers except for a tiny subset of problems.

There’s one area, however, where you’ll find all sides agree: Quantum computing will break most of the encryption schemes on which we rely today. If you’re responsible for your organization’s IT or security systems, and that sentence made the hair on the back of your neck stand up, good. To get ready for a post-quantum world, you should be thinking about the problem now.

Continue reading “Start Preparing Now for the Post-Quantum Future” »

SpaceX continues making news in 2018. The company first broke its own record from 2017 when it passed 18 launches in year. On Sunday, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, SpaceX launched another record-setting rocket… this one for U.S. national security. Arash Arabasadi reports.

Water scarcity is a global security risk. Researchers are developing ways to forecast risks to prevent conflicts.

A plant grows between cracked mud at the Theewaterskloof dam near Cape Town, South Africa, on Jan. 21, 2018. The dam, which supplies most of Cape Town’s potable water, is currently dangerously low as the city faces “Day Zero”, the point at which taps will be shut down across the city. Mike Hutchings / Reuters file.

For its 2018 finale, A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the U.S. Air Force’s first third-generation navigation satellite for the Global Positioning System (GPS 3–01) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Liftoff window begins at 8:51 a.m. EST (1351 GMT).

Continue reading “WATCH LIVE: SpaceX to Launch Falcon 9 Rocket #GPS III-1 #2018Finale @8:51am EST” »

Digital security depends on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. A new proof shows why one method for breaking digital encryption won’t work.

“We’re sorry this happened,” Tomer Bar, engineering director at Facebook, wrote in a blog post about the flaw.

The flaw allowed apps that users accessed through the social network’s “Facebook Login” system to see photos that had been uploaded but not published on Facebook, as well as photos published to Facebook’s “Marketplace” and to its Stories feature.

“The bug also impacted photos that people uploaded to Facebook but chose not to post,” Bar wrote.

Continue reading “Facebook apologizes after security flaw exposes unpublished photos” »

We’ve discovered water on the asteroid Bennu! Our OSIRIS-REx mission has revealed water locked inside the clays that make up Bennu.

Recently analyzed data from NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission has revealed water locked inside the clays that make up its scientific target, the asteroid Bennu.

Continue reading “NASA’s Newly Arrived OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Discovers Water on Bennu” »

Holography is a powerful tool that can reconstruct wavefronts of light and combine the fundamental wave properties of amplitude, phase, polarization, wave vector and frequency. Smart multiplexing techniques (multiple signal integration) together with metasurface designs are currently in high demand to explore the capacity to engineer information storage systems and enhance optical encryption security using such metasurface holograms.

Holography based on metasurfaces is a promising candidate for applications in optical displays/storage with enormous information bearing capacity alongside a large field of view compared to traditional methods. To practically realize metasurface holograms, holographic profiles should be encoded on ultrathin nanostructures that possess strong light-matter interactions (plasmonic interactions) in an ultrashort distance. Metasurfaces can control light and acoustic waves in a manner not seen in nature to provide a flexible and compact platform and realize a variety of vectorial holograms, with high dimensional information that surpass the limits of liquid crystals or optical photoresists.

Among the existing techniques employed to achieve highly desired optical properties, polarization multiplexing (multiple signal integration) is an attractive method. The strong cross-talk associated with such platforms can, however, be prevented with birefringent metasurfaces (two-dimensional surfaces with two different refractive indices) composed of a single meta-atom per unit-cell for optimized polarization multiplexing.

Continue reading “Multichannel vectorial holographic display and encryption” »

Tesla launched a new ‘Enhanced Anti-theft’ system as an aftermarket product last month and we now take a first look at one of the very first installations on a Model X.

There have been strings of Tesla thefts earlier this year that prompt the automaker to offer several new security features.

We reported on several Tesla vehicle thefts through relay attacks in Europe earlier this year.