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Monday, 29 December 2014

High School Student Creates Smart Gun That Only Unlocks With Fingerprints.

  Author : Harmanpreet Singh     No comments
15:41


There have been a lot of debate about gun safety over the years, and there have been many suggestions that have come up. For example earlier this year gun manufacturer Armatix came up with a solution which is to pair a gun with a smartwatch, thus allowing it to fire only if the smartwatch is in range. This means that if you don’t have the watch, you can’t fire it, which would hopefully help reduce accidental shootings or gun theft.

Well it looks like we now have another possible contender for smarter guns, thanks to a 17-year old by the name of Kai Kloepfer, a high school student from Boulder who won the $50,000 grand prize in the SmartTech for Firearms Challenge. Kloepfer’s answer to gun safety was to embed a fingerprint sensor on the gun, thus unlocking it only if an authorized fingerprint is detected.
Kloepfer’s creation will also store the fingerprints locally within the gun itself as opposed to in the cloud where it could potentially be hacked. This would also make it ideal for military use. Kloepfer has also suggested that multiple fingerprints could be stored in the database so that guns could be shared amongst authorized users, such as police in a precinct.

The teen has managed to create a prototype with a plastic model of a gun which costs him about $3,000 to put together. The money he won from the challenge is expected to go towards purchasing a 3D printer to create new parts for his prototype and the rest will go towards the integration of the fingerprint scanner.

We should point out that there have been concepts and prototypes of guns with fingerprint security in the past, so safe to say this isn’t the first, but it’s still a worthy effort for the youngster.

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Politician's Fingerprint 'cloned from photos' by Hacker...

  Author : Harmanpreet Singh     No comments
15:40

Mr. Krissler provided details of his technique at a convention in Hamburg.
A member of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) hacker network claims to have cloned a thumbprint of a German politician by using commercial software and images taken at a news conference.

Jan Krissler says he replicated the fingerprint of defence minister Ursula von der Leyen using pictures taken with a "standard photo camera".

Mr Krissler had no physical print from Ms. Von der Leyen.

Fingerprint Biometrics are already considered insecure, experts say.

Mr. Krissler, also known as Starbug, was speaking at a convention for members of the CCC, a 31-year-old network that claims to be "Europe's largest association" of hackers.

'Wear gloves'

He told the audience he had obtained a close-up of a photo of Ms von der Leyen's thumb and had also used other pictures taken at different angles during a press event that the minister had spoken at in October.

Mr. Krissler has suggested that "politicians will presumably wear gloves when talking in public" after hearing about his research.

Fingerprint identification is used as a security measure on both Apple and Samsung devices, and was used to identify voters at polling stations in Brazil's presidential election this year, but it is not considered to be particularly secure, experts say.
German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen's fingerprint was cloned just from photos, the hacker claims.

Living Biometrics

"Biometrics that rely on static information like face recognition or fingerprints - it's not trivial to forge them but most people have accepted that they are not a great form of security because they can be faked," says cybersecurity expert Prof Alan Woodward from Surrey University.

"People are starting to look for things where the biometric is alive - vein recognition in fingers, gait [body motion] analysis - they are also biometrics but they are chosen because the person has to be in possession of them and exhibiting them in real life."

In September this year Barclays bank introduced finger vein recognition for business customers, and the technique is also used at cash machines in Japan and Poland.

Electronics firm Hitachi manufactures a device that reads the unique pattern of veins inside a finger. It only works if the finger is attached to a living person.

Trials in the intensive care unit at Southampton General Hospital in 2013 indicated that vein patterns are not affected by changes to blood pressure.

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Sunday, 28 December 2014

CES 2015 Connected Car Panel: How 4G is Driving the Future of Driving!

  Author : Harmanpreet Singh     No comments
14:01


Connected cars are more common than you think, these days. Whether through an integrated modem buried beneath the dash or a wireless link to a smartphone, an awful lot of the cars on dealership lots these days have some form of connectivity. But, that's just the beginning.

Those integrated connections are getting faster, and it won't be long before 4G LTE in the car is standard fare. Cars as rolling Wi-Fi hotspots? Sure, but that's just the beginning. How about a video feed from your car's security system sent to your phone if the alarm gets triggered? High-quality music streaming directly to the dashboard would be a natural fit, as would instant updates to traffic and maybe even streaming video for your passengers in the back seat.

There are plenty of exciting opportunities once your car gets a high-speed connection to the cloud, and plenty of very encouraging opportunities when cars start talking directly to each other. Vehicle-to-vehicle communications could warn you of everything from ice on the road to fog in the air instantly, and enhanced accident-avoidance enabled by these sorts of systems will absolutely save lives.

But when? How long is it going to take to get this kind of technology, and how much are we going to have to pay for it? This'll gonna revealing with industry experts at 1:00 p.m. PT on Wednesday, January 7, as we discuss driving in a connected future.

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