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NASA buys into ‘quantum’ computer

Thursday, May 16th, 2013

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A $15m computer that uses “quantum physics” effects to boost its speed is to be installed at a NASA facility.

It will be shared by Google, NASA, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers.

Unlike standard machines, the D-Wave Two processor appears to make use of an effect called quantum tunnelling.

This allows it to reach solutions to certain types of mathematical problems in fractions of a second.
"Qubit" probability distributionsEffectively, it can try all possible solutions at the same time and then select the best.

Google wants to use the facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California to find out how quantum computing might advance techniques of machine learning and artificial intelligence, including voice recognition.

University researchers will also get 20% of the time on the machine via the Universities Space Research Agency (USRA).

NASA will likely use the commercially available machine for scheduling problems and planning.

Canadian company D-Wave Systems, which makes the machine, has drawn scepticism over the years from quantum computing experts around the world.

Until research outlined earlier this year, some even suggested its machines showed no evidence of using specifically quantum effects.

Quantum computing is based around exploiting the strange behaviour of matter at quantum scales.

Most work on this type of computing has focused on building quantum logic gates similar to the gate devices at the basis of conventional computing.

But physicists have repeatedly found that the problem with a gate-based approach is keeping the quantum bits, or qubits (the basic units of quantum information), in their quantum state.

“You get drop out… decoherence, where the qubits lapse into being simple 1s and 0s instead of the entangled quantum states you need. Errors creep in,” says Prof Alan Woodward of Surrey University.

One gate opens…

Instead, D-Wave Systems has been focused on building machines that exploit a technique called quantum annealing – a way of distilling the optimal mathematical solutions from all the possibilities.

Annealing is made possible by physics effect known as quantum tunnelling, which can endow each qubit with an awareness of every other one.

“The gate model… is the single worst thing that ever happened to quantum computing”, Geordie Rose, chief technology officer for D-Wave, told BBC Radio 4′s Material World programme.

“And when we look back 20 years from now, at the history of this field, we’ll wonder why anyone ever thought that was a good idea.”

Dr Rose’s approach entails a completely different way of posing your question, and it only works for certain questions.

But according to a paper presented this week (the result of benchmarking tests required by NASA and Google), it is very fast indeed at finding the optimal solution to a problem that potentially has many different combinations of answers.

In one case it took less than half a second to do something that took conventional software 30 minutes.

A classic example of one of these “combinatorial optimisation” problems is that of the travelling sales rep, who needs to visit several cities in one day, and wants to know the shortest path that connects them all together in order to minimise their mileage.

The D-Wave Two chip can compare all the possible itineraries at once, rather than having to work through each in turn.

Reportedly costing up to $15m, housed in a garden shed-sized box that cools the chip to near absolute zero, it should be installed at NASA and available for research by autumn 2013.

US giant Lockheed Martin earlier this year upgraded its own D-Wave machine to the 512 qubit D-Wave Two.

Source:  BBC

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Open IP ports let anyone track ships on Internet

Tuesday, April 30th, 2013

In 12hrs, researchers log more than 2GB of data on ships due to automatic ID systems.

While digging through the data unearthed in an unprecedented census of nearly the entire Internet, Researchers at Rapid7 Labs have discovered a lot of things they didn’t expect to find openly responding to port scans. One of the biggest surprises they discovered was the availability of data that allowed them to track the movements of more than 34,000 ships at sea. The data can pinpoint ships down to their precise geographic location through Automated Identification System receivers connected to the Internet.

The AIS receivers, many of them connected directly to the Internet via serial port servers, are carried aboard ships, buoys, and other navigation markers. The devices are installed at Coast Guard and other maritime facilities ashore to prevent collisions at sea within coastal waters and to let agencies to track the comings and goings of international shipping. Rapid7 security researcher Claudio Guarnieri wrote in a blog post on Rapid7′s Security Street community site that he, Rapid7 Chief Research Officer H.D. Moore, and fellow researcher Mark Schloesser discovered about 160 AIS receivers still active and responding over the Internet. In 12 hours, the trio was able to log more than two gigabytes of data on ships’ positions—including military and law enforcement vessels.

For many of the ships, the vessel’s name was included in the broadcast data pulled from the receivers. For others, the identification numbers broadcast by their beacons are easily found on the Internet. By sifting through the data, the researchers were able to plot the location of individual ships. “Considering that a lot of military, law enforcement, cargoes, and passenger ships do broadcast their positions, we feel that this is a security risk,” Guarnieri wrote.

Among the other information found in the AIS data were “safety messages,” text messages sent between ships and navigation stations to inform each other of hazards. Some of the messages were actually the equivalent of casual texts to arriving ships’ masters: “MOINMOIN GREETINGS TO YOUR CPT.”

Source:  arstechnica.com

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IBM’s solar tech is 80% efficient thanks to supercomputer know-how

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013

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By borrowing cooling systems used in its supercomputers, IBM Research claims it can dramatically increase the overall efficiency of concentrated photovoltaic solar power from 30 to 80 percent.

Like other concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) collectors, IBM’s system at its Zurich laboratory uses a mirrored parabolic dish to concentrate incoming solar radiation onto PV cells. The dish uses a tracking system to move with the sun, concentrating the collected radiation by a factor of 2,000 onto a sensor containing triple-junction PV cells. During daylight hours, each 1-sq cm PV chip generates on average between 200 and 250 watts of electrical power, harnessing up to 30 percent of the incoming solar energy.

Ordinarily, the remaining 70 percent of energy would be lost as heat. But by capturing most of that heat with water, IBM Research says it is able to reduce system heat losses to around 20 percent of the total incoming energy. This results in a bottom-line efficiency of 80 percent for its CPV collector, dubbed HCPVT for High Concentration Photovoltaic Thermal. Unlike a regular CPV system, HCPVT delivers its energy in two forms: electricity and hot water.

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/8662459375_8ed35510be_b-300x329.jpgThe thermal system was adapted from IBM Research’s 6-teraflop Aquasar supercomputer, which went online at ETH Zurich in 2010. By using water as a coolant, Aquasar consumes three fifths of the energy of a comparable air-cooled machine of the time. Crucially, the hot water could be put to work heating university buildings, reducing Aquasar’s carbon footprint to a claimed 15 percent of what would otherwise have been the case.

As with Aquasar, micro-channels between 50 and 100 micrometers in diameter carry water exceptionally close to the source of heat: the processing units in the case of Aquasar, the PV cells here. Thermal resistance is reduced to a tenth of competing systems with larger water channels.

“This allows us to cool with hot water, which sounds a bit strange,” IBM scientist Dr. Bruno Michel told Ars during a Skype call. “The photovoltaic chip is around 100º [centigrade] while the coolant is 90º.”

To live up to its efficiency, the HCPVT system needs to put its hot water to good use. Though outside the scope of this team’s work, IBM Research is also looking at systems which could use the heat by-product to purify water or, somewhat counterintuitively, to cool buildings using adsorption refrigeration.

The team has developed a prototype with a 4×4-cm PV receiver which generates about 1kW of electrical power. It hopes to develop a much larger HCPVT system with a 100-sq m dish and a 25×25 cm receiver, producing 25kW of electrical power and 50kW of thermal power. (Larger PV receivers have gaps between the chips, so you don’t gain an additional 200W of electrical power for every square centimeter of receiver you add.)

In a YouTube video, Dr. Michel raises the possibility that these larger HCPVT collectors could one day be used to build solar power stations in, say, the Sahara Desert. According to the team’s calculations, covering 2 percent of the area of the Sahara with HCPVT would meet the world’s electricity needs, transmission issues aside. Not that you need a desert. Michel told Ars that the system is useful almost anywhere where you have direct solar radiation—Zurich, for instance. “By adding the thermal output we can extend its range of applications compared to CPV,” he said.

The HCPVT system has been in development for more than 5 years, initially in collaboration with the Egypt Nanotechnology Research Center.

Source:  arstechnica.com

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Hybrid Memory Cube spec makes DRAM 15 times faster

Friday, April 5th, 2013

Final spec for three-dimensional DRAM is backed by memory makers Micron, Samsung, and Hynix

Backed by 100 tech companies, the three largest memory makers announced the final specifications for three-dimensional DRAM, which is aimed at increasing performance for networking and high-performance computing markets.

Micron, Samsung and Hynix are leading the technology development efforts backed by the Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium (HMC). The technology, called a Hybrid Memory Cube, will stack multiple volatile memory dies on top of a DRAM controller.

The DRAM is connected to the controller by way of the relatively new silicon VIA (Vertical Interconnect Access) technology, a method of passing an electrical wire vertically through a silicon wafer.

Mike Black, chief technology strategist for Micron’s Hybrid Memory Cube team, said what the developers did was change the basic structure of DRAM.

“We took the logic portion of the DRAM functionality out of it and dropped that into the logic chip that sits at the base of that 3D stack,” Black said. “That logic process allows us to take advantage of higher performance transistors … to not only interact up through the DRAM on top of it, but in a high-performance, efficient manner across a channel to a host processor.

“So that logic layer serves both as the host interface connection as well as the memory controller for the DRAM sitting on top of it,” he added.

The DRAM is broken into 16 partitions, each one with two I/O channels back to the controller. Each Hybrid Memory Cube — there are two prototypes — has either 128 or 256 memory banks available to the host system.

The first Hybrid Memory Cube specification will deliver 2GB and 4GB of capacity, providing aggregate bi-directional bandwidth of up to 160GBps compared with DDR3′s 11GBps of aggregate bandwidth and DDR4, with 18GB to 20GB of aggregate bandwidth, Black said.

Jim Handy, director of research firm Objective Analysis, said the Hybrid Memory Cube technology solves some significant memory issues. Today’s DRAM chips are burdened with having to drive circuit board traces or copper electrical connections, and the I/O pins of numerous other chips to force data down the bus at gigahertz speeds, which consumes a lot of energy.

The Hybrid Memory Cube technology reduces this task to make the DRAM drive only tiny TSVs which are connected to much lower loads over shorter distances,” he said. A logic chip at the bottom is the only one burdened with driving the circuit board traces and the processor’s I/O pins.

“The interface is 15 times as fast as standard DRAMs … while reducing power by 70 percent,” Handy said “Basically, the beauty of it is that it gets rid of all the issues that were keeping DDR3 and DDR4 from going as fast as they could.”

For example, Handy said, instead of having multiple DIMMS (which can range from one to four) on a motherboard, you would need only one Hybrid Memory Cube, cutting down on the number of interfaces to the CPU.

The HMC has defined two physical interfaces back to a host system processor: a short reach and an ultra-short reach. The short reach is similar to most motherboard technologies today where the DRAM is within eight to 10 inches of the CPU. That technology is aimed mainly for use in network applications and has the goal of boosting throughput from as much as 15Gbps to 28Gbps per lane in a four-lane configuration.

“The first package we’re going to launch commercially in the second half of this year is in a fairly large package because fundamentally the networking base doesn’t want package pitch lower than 1 millimeter on the ball pitch for the bottom of the ball grid array,” Black said. “So physically the logic chip and the DRAM die are in the 100 square-millimeter size sitting on a bigger package to accommodate the ball-out requirements for a short reach design in a networking platform.”

The ultra short-reach interconnection definition is focused on a low energy, close-proximity memory design support of FPGAs, ASICs and ASSPs, such as high-performance networking, and test and measurement applications. That will have a one to three-inch channel back to the CPU, and it has the throughput goal of 15Gbps per lane.

“It’s optimized at very low energy signaling for multi-chip modules,” Black said. “That’s where you’ll see a very small package form factor where you’re sub-300 micron ball pitch.”

While 3D DRAM will cost more to make than its predecessor, Black pointed out that it would cost more to gain the aggregate bandwidth using standard DRAM modules.

“If you look at the total cost of offering a cube, versus trying to get to that kind of bandwidth with traditional DRAM technology, we can in many cases show the total system cost as being much better with Hybrid Memory Cube,” he said.

Source:  infoworld.com

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Quantum encryption keys obtained from a moving plane

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

A technical demonstration shows that an exchange with satellites is possible.

Here in the Ars science section, we cover a lot of interesting research that may eventually lead to the sort of technology discussed in other areas of the site. In many cases, that sort of deployment will be years away (assuming it ever happens). But in a couple of fields, the rapid pace of proof-of-principle demonstrations hints that commercialization isn’t too far beyond the horizon.

One of these areas is quantum key distribution between places that aren’t in close proximity. Quantum keys hold the promise of creating a unique, disposable key on demand in such a way that any attempts to eavesdrop will quickly become obvious. We know how to do this over relatively short distances using fiber optic cables, so the basic technique is well-established. Throughout the past couple of years, researchers have been getting rid of the cables: first by sending quantum information across a lake, then by exchanging it between two islands.

The latter feat involved a distance of 144km, which is getting closer to the sorts of altitudes occupied by satellites. But exchanging keys with satellites would seem to add a significant challenge—they move. Over the weekend, Nature Photonics published a paper that indicates we shouldn’t necessarily view that as an obstacle. The paper describes a team of German researchers who managed to obtain quantum keys transmitted from a moving aircraft.

The aircraft in question was a Dornier 228 turboprop in which the authors set up a shock-protected optical bench to generate the photons they needed for the experiment. Those were sent via a fiber optic cable to a transmitter on the underside of the aircraft. This included tracking equipment that allowed it to keep the transmissions pointed at a specific ground station.

That ground station was a 40cm telescope operated by the German Aerospace Center. It was kept pointed at the aircraft by using GPS coordinates transmitted by the aircraft over classical communications channels. Once it had a fix, a beacon laser was used to illuminate the aircraft, confirming that a directional link had been established. At that point, the plane’s hardware could start transmitting bits using the polarization of photons.

Since this was a proof of principle, the authors simply rotated through four potential polarizations in order to ensure that they could tell when the ground station was picking up the appropriate bit. One of the big problems was noise. Each second, the ground station’s detectors were picking up background noise at a rate of about 1,000 events per second, while the aircraft was only transmitting 800 bits per second (so there was a lot of noise to filter out). Some of this was actually from the aircraft’s blinking anticollision light, which the detector picked up nicely.

By filtering out the noise (and discarding anything from when the anticollision light flashed), the authors were able to achieve a rate of about 145 bits a second. Adding the extra information needed to detect eavesdropping would drop that to eight bits a second. That would be a horrific rate for transmitting data, but remember, these are just the bits of a key. Once the key is established, encrypted communications can take place on much faster channels. If they were willing to gather keys for a while, they could get as many as 80 kilobits in a single passage of the plane.

In the end, the authors say that the hard part was developing the pointing system and developing a system that could account for the rotation of the hardware as it tracked, which can otherwise skew the measurements. But with those developed, it seems that exchanging keys with a free-moving object is relatively straightforward. We may not be ready to put this in orbit yet, but it certainly seems like we’re getting very close to being ready to try.

Source:  arstechnica.com

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IBM moves toward post-silicon transistor

Friday, March 22nd, 2013

IBM’s new work shows that flexible low-power circuitry could be built with strongly correlated materials

Exploring methods of computing without silicon, IBM has found a way to make transistors that could be fashioned into virtual circuitry that mimics how the human brain operates.

The proposed transistors would be made from strongly correlated materials, which researchers have found to posses characteristics favorable for building more powerful, less power-hungry computation circuitry.

IBM transistor“The scaling of conventional-based transistors is nearing an end after a fantastic run of 50 years,” said Stuart Parkin, an IBM fellow at IBM Research who leads the research. “We need to consider alternative devices and materials that will have to operate entirely differently. There aren’t many avenues to follow beyond silicon. One of them is correlated electronic systems.”

Parkin’s team is the first to convert metal oxides from an insulated to conductive state by applying oxygen ions to the material. The team published details of the work in this week’s edition of the Science journal.

The circuitry used in today’s computer processors, memory and other components is made from large numbers of integrated transistors built from silicon wafers. Conventional transistors work by applying a small voltage across a gate, which can control — or switch on or off — a larger current passing through the transistor.

IBM’s technique uses another approach to switching conductive states of a material. It requires strongly correlated electron materials, such as metal oxides. By conventional theory, these materials should act like conductors, but they are actually insulators. “They don’t obey conventional band theory,” Parkin said. Under certain conditions, however, they can change their conductive states.

Research has been going on for several years, in fact, to find ways of changing conductivity states in strongly correlated materials. Previous approaches, however, relied on techniques of applying stress to a material, or subjecting it to temperature changes. Neither approach would be practical to use in mass-produced circuitry. IBM’s specific breakthrough, described in the paper, is that the conductive state of material could be changed by injecting oxygen molecules.

In IBM’s setup, these electrons are introduced through contact with an ionic liquid, consisting of large, irregularly shaped molecules. When a voltage is applied to this liquid, and the liquid is placed on the oxide material, the material can change from a conductor to an insulator, or vice versa.

This approach could be more energy effective than standard silicon transistors, in that the resulting transistors would be nonvolatile — they don’t need to be constantly refreshed with a power source to maintain their state, Parkin said. A charge can be set by applying the voltage once.

These materials may not switch their states as quickly as silicon transistors, though their relatively low switching speed may not be a factor, given their greater flexibility, Parkin said. In theory such transistors could mimic how the human brain operates in that “liquids and currents of ions [are used] to change materials,” Parkin said. “We know brains can carry out computing operations a million times more efficiently than silicon-based computers,” Parkin said.

To work, such circuitry would take advantage of microfluidics, the emerging practice of engineering around how to tightly control small amounts of liquids in a system. “We would direct fluids to particular surfaces or three-dimensional structures of oxides and then change their properties by applying gate voltages,” Parkin said. Entire virtual circuits could be built and once their work is finished, they could be torn down by simply passing liquid though other channels.

Source:  networkworld.com

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Test your SSDs or risk massive data loss, researchers warn

Friday, March 1st, 2013
New study finds 13 of 15 flash-based solid-state drives suffer data loss or worse when they lose power

Companies adopting flash-based SSDs as a cornerstone to the data center storage systems are risking “massive data loss” due to power outages, according to a new study titled “Understanding the Robustness of SSDs Under Power Fault” by researchers from the University of Ohio and HP Labs. In exposing 15 SSDs from five different vendors to power loss, researchers found that 13 suffered such failures as bit corruption, metadata corruption, and total device failure. The paper did not specify which vendors’ drives were used.

Researchers Mai Zheng, Joseph Tucek, Feng Qin, and Mark Lillibridge conducted the study to assess how SSDs behave when power is cut unexpectedly during operation, noting that SSDs are gradually replacing spinning disks in data centers. SSD enthusiasts claim the drives are faster, more affordable, and more reliable than traditional hard drives. Unfortunately, SSDs may be more susceptible to damage from a simple power failure than data center operators realized.

“Although loss of power seems like an easy fault to prevent, recent experience shows that a simple loss of power is still a distressingly frequent occurrence even for sophisticated data center operators like Amazon,” according to the paper.

Researchers subjected the 15 SSDs to more than 3,000 fault injection cycles in all, and found that 13 — including “supposedly ‘enterprise-class’ devices” exhibited failure behavior. All of them lost some amount of data that researchers had expected to survive the fault. Two units “became massively corrupted, with one no longer registering on the SAS bus at all,” while another saw one-third of its blocks becoming inaccessible after eight fault cycles.

Overall, researchers observed five failure types: bit corruption, shorn writes, unserializable writes, metadata corruption, and dead devices. “The block-level behavior of SSDs exposed in our experiments has important implications for the design of storage systems,” according to the researchers. “For example, the frequency of both bit corruption and shorn writes make update-in-place to a sole copy of data that needs to survive power failure inadvisable. Because many storage systems like filesystems and databases rely on the correct order of operations to maintain consistency, serialization errors are particularly problematic.”

The researchers’ conclusion: “SSDs offer the promise of vastly higher performance operation; our results show that they do not provide reliable durability under even the simplest of faults: loss of power.”

They recommend that “system builders either not use SSDs for important information that needs to be durable or that they test their actual SSD models carefully under actual power failures beforehand. Failure to do so risks massive data loss.”

Source:  infoworld.com

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Sports Stadiums and Wi-Fi Connectivity: Will It Ever Get Better?

Thursday, February 14th, 2013

Reliable, speedy, in-stadium wireless connectivity is what most sports fans dream of.

The roar of the crowd rips through the stadium as the last shot clinches victory for the hometown team. You let out a triumphant hoot, embrace the people around you in the stands and relish the joyful delirium as it sets in.

Right then and there, in that moment of bliss, you decide you want to share this moment with the world, so you whip out your smartphone to post a status update to Facebook. But when you open up the Facebook app, you’re hit with the non-connectivity message of doom: “No Internet Connection.”

If you’ve ever gone to a professional sporting event — an NBA, NHL, NFL or MLS game for starters — you’ve probably run into this frustrating scenario a time or two. And you’re not alone.

Connectivity inside stadiums was a hot topic among sports executives and technologists at the On Deck Sports & Technology Conference in New York City.

“Right now we’re not meeting the fans’ expectations,” said Matt Higgins, CEO of RSE Ventures, a sports and entertainment venture capital firm, during a session. “In most venues, you can’t even send a text message. Fans expect to be able to interact with content in venue as they do at home.”

But why haven’t we figured out wireless connectivity yet? After all, Wi-Fi was born in the late 1990s, and we’re now on the fourth iteration of the mobile broadband standard so what’s the hold up? It turns out that the answers to this technology mystery aren’t so easy to unravel.

What’s to Blame: Inadequate Funds or Technology?

When it comes to pointing fingers at what, exactly, is gumming up the Wi-Fi in stadiums, people cast blame on either the lack of money invested in connectivity or the inadequacy of wireless technology itself.

Higgins believes that teams investing in wireless technology by themselves isn’t going to cut it. The leagues need to band together to make more substantial investments, he argues.

“[The leagues] should bring everyone together and make the investment,” Higgins said. “A team can’t come up with the ROI on that investment. In the venues that are aggressive, like we are in Miami, we have 1,200 Wi-Fi access points. But it’s expensive.”

Scott O’Neil, former president of Madison Square Garden Sports, is of the mind that throwing money at the problem won’t solve it. In his experience, wireless technology can’t handle the demands of a connected sea of fans in a stadium.

“The technology just isn’t there yet,” O’Neil said during a session. Upgrades to infrastructure technology alone didn’t deliver on the same wireless experience that most people get at home when he worked for MSG Sports.

Does this mean technology has left us out to dry? Not quite.

In another panel session at the conference, Gene Arantowicz, senior director of business development in Cisco’s Sports and Entertainment Group, said the technology necessary to deliver Wi-Fi in stadiums “has arrived.”

“It’s [called] a high-density wireless network,” he said. Wireless technology in stadiums is something that Cisco Systems in particular has been aggressive on innovating. They’ve dubbed these wireless-ready stadiums “Cisco Connected Stadiums.” And if you’ve ever been inside one, you’ll be impressed.

Arantowicz does acknowledge, however, that the Cisco experience is not yet ubiquitous in most stadiums.

“Not everybody has it,” he said. It’s been rolled out by Cisco only “in over 100 deployments in 20 some countries.”

Arantowicz cited the company’s recently announced partnership with the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, which will allow fans to stream live video in the stadium, as an example of the innovative stadiums that are within reach.

Bob Jordan, senior vice president of the Van Wagner Sports Group, applauds the advances that technology has made, but he also points out that Wi-Fi wasn’t necessarily built for the stadium use case.

“High-density Wi-Fi is good, but [Wi-Fi] really wasn’t designed to do that,” he said.

Using baseball stadiums as an example, Jordan highlighted the infrastructural challenges MLB teams face since the distance from the dugout to the outfield exceeds the range of even the most advanced access points.

“At the end of the day, we have a convergence of the way the buildings are built and [we’re] wrestling with how do we get [wireless] in these venues,” he said.

The Wi-Fi challenges don’t mean anyone in sports is going to give up trying to improve connectivity anytime soon though. It just means the sports industry has its work cut out for it.

For any team operating in today’s market, “technology is a requirement,” Jordan said definitively. And there’s no getting around it.

Source:  biztechmagazine.com

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4G to affect TV reception in two million [UK] homes

Wednesday, February 13th, 2013

Filters will be provided for Freeview televisions which experience reception problems following the roll out of 4G later this year.

Ofcom estimates that the TV viewing in up to 2.3 million British households could be affected by 4G but only 40% of them have Freeview.

Satellite receivers will not be affected, the watchdog claims.

A fund provided by the 4G auction winners will be used to pay for filters for those who need them.

At the moment only mobile operator EE is able to offer customers the 4G service, which provides faster mobile internet connections.

The other operators are currently bidding for licences in an auction run by telecoms watchdog Ofcom.

Up to £180m from the auction will be used to fund the filters, a spokesperson from Ofcom said.

However, around 1% of affected Freeview households will be unable to use them and will be offered an alternative instead.

Ofcom estimates there may be fewer than 1000 homes in the UK who will not be able to access those alternatives either and will be left without television services.

A not-for-profit organisation called Digital Mobile Spectrum Limited (DMSL) has been created to tackle the problem.

“I look forward to working closely with broadcasters and mobile network operators to ensure everyone continues to be able to receive their current TV service,” said newly appointed chief executive Simon Beresford-Wiley.

“DMSL plans to pre-empt the majority of potential interference issues caused by 4G at 800 MHz and existing TV services. We’re focused on being able to provide anyone who may be affected with the information and equipment they’ll need to ensure they continue to receive free-to-air TV.”

Last month Freeview homes in South Wales had to retune their TVs and boxes following technical changes to a transmitter in order to make way for 4G.

Source:  BBC

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We’re going to blow up your boiler: Critical bug threatens hospital systems

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

21,000 vulnerable systems found on the Internet, used by hospitals, others.

More than 20,000 Internet-connected devices sold by Honeywell are vulnerable to a hack that allows attackers to remotely seize control of building heating systems, elevators, and other industrial equipment and in some cases, cause them to malfunction.

The hijacking vulnerability in Niagara AX-branded hardware and software sold by Honeywell’s Tridium division was demonstrated at this week’s Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Billy Rios and Terry McCorkle, two security experts with a firm called Cylance, allowed an audience to watch as they executed a custom script that took about 25 seconds to take control of a default configuration of the industrial control software. When they were done they had unfettered control over the device, which is used to centralize control over alarm systems, garage doors, heating ventilation and cooling systems, and other equipment in large buildings.

Taking advantage of the flaw would give attackers half a world away the same control on-site engineers have over connected systems. Extortionists, disgruntled or unstable employees, or even terrorists could potentially exploit vulnerabilities that allow them to bring about catastrophic effects, such as causing a large heating system to explode or catch fire or to sabotage large chillers used by hospitals and other facilities. Attackers could also exploit the bug to gain a toehold into networks, which could then be further penetrated using additional vulnerabilities that may be present.

“We actually just used this against one of our premium clients a couple weeks ago,” Rios said, referring to a penetration test he performed to test a customer’s network for hacking vulnerabilities. “They were pretty shocked. They took their device off the Internet before the engagement was over.”

The researchers said a recent query on the Shodan computer search engine found 21,541 Internet-connected Niagara devices, some operated by military installations, hospitals, and other mission-critical facilities. Tests the pair performed on a small sample of the machines confirmed they were accessible over the Internet. The non-descript boxes are often installed by third-party contractors in out-of-the-way closets, so on-site administrators and managers may not even know they’re in use. In addition to opening up critical equipment to tampering, Tridium’s products also expose corporate and government networks to intruders since the devices often are connected directly to local networks using one of two Ethernet ports built into the boxes.

ICS: less secure than iTunes

This week’s hack was only the latest demonstration of the risks created by many industrial control systems (ICS), which are designed to use computers to control building temperatures, turn alarms on and off, and maintain emergency generators and industrial power supplies. Tridium quietly patched its Niagara software last year after Rios and McCorkle found it contained a separate vulnerability that also allowed unauthorized access. A raft of other ICS devices have been found to contain similar critical defects, including those from Siemens-owned Ruggedcom and another line of mission-critical routers made by a Fremont, California-based GarrettCom.

The devices are billed as a way to lower the cost of maintaining large collections of equipment that are often scattered throughout buildings or other facilities. Rather than requiring engineers to physically travel to where each device is physically located, they can make changes remotely, from a single office in the building, or even off site. Indeed, Tridium’s marketing material defines the Niagara framework as a “universal software infrastructure that allows companies to build custom, web-enabled applications for accessing, automating, and controlling smart devices in real time over the Internet.” The company provides a wealth of customer case studies, including one from the James Cook University Hospital in the UK.

Security experts have long argued that the convenience often comes at the price of security, and there are some disturbing examples of the risks from the last couple of years. In 2009, a recently discharged security guard who had physical access to ICS computers was arrested after posting screen shots and videos showing him planning to remotely cripple air-conditioning systems at a Texas hospital, where temperatures regularly reach into the triple digits. Last year, hackers illegally accessed the Internet-connected heating and air-conditioning controls of a New Jersey-based company. The vulnerability the intruders exploited was the same one Tridium patched in secret last year.

Despite the potentially critical consequences of ICS hacks, manufacturers sometimes decline to patch their wares at all, giving rise to the term forever-day vulnerabilities. Last year, Rios said the security of iTunes was more robust than most ICS software.

Game Over

Rios and McCorkle declined to describe the specific series of vulnerabilities behind their latest hack other than to say the bugs allowed them to remotely acquire a configuration file used to customize a Niagara box for a specific network. Among other things, the config.bog file contains user names and passwords that are encoded using “encraption,” the word the research pair uses to describe Tridium engineers’ encryption routines. Using the credentials, they were able to gain access to the “station” layer of the device that provides only limited user rights. Exploiting another series of vulnerabilities allowed them to access Niagara’s “platform,” which gives them full “system” access when it runs on Microsoft Windows or “root” access when running on Linux or a proprietary embedded operating system.

“Once we own the platform, it’s game over,” Rios said.


Enlarge / The Tridium hack in action. The screens on the left show the attack platform. The screen on the right is the Niagara AX framework responding.
Dan Goodin

Rios said he acquired a Tridium box by purchasing one on eBay. He then spent months reverse engineering the firmware it ran. His job was made easy by the fact that much of the Niagara framework uses unsigned, unobfuscated Java code, allowing him to decompile the binary and read the raw source code.

In a statement issued Wednesday evening, Tridium officials said:

Tridium takes these security issues very seriously and we appreciate the efforts by researchers like Billy Rios and Terry McCorkle to raise awareness about them.

Tridium was made aware of the vulnerability cited at the conference in late December 2012, and immediately began working on a solution, in cooperation with both ICS-Cert and the researchers. We will be issuing a security patch that resolves the problem by Feb. 13 and are alerting our user community about this today. We share the concern that Mr. Rios and Mr. McCorkle have in raising awareness about the need to protect Internet-facing control systems. The vast majority of Niagara AX systems are behind firewalls and VPNs – as we recommend — but clearly, as Rios and McCorkle have shown, there are many systems potentially at risk.

The Tridium vulnerabilities are among more than 1,000 bugs Rios and McCorkle have reported to ICS manufacturers over the past year, resulting in 30 advisories issued by the Department of Homeland Security-affiliated ICS-CERT. They said the engineers who designed the systems are often defensive and direct their anger back at the researchers once the vulnerabilities are disclosed.

“We don’t think we’re the only ones that are doing this,” Rios said of the research into ICS. “There’s tons of other people that are doing this and they’re not standing on a stage somewhere presenting their work for the whole world to see. That’s what they really need to worry about. These guys are kind of stuck a little bit in the stone age.”

Source:  arstechnica.com

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