News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Older smartphone users tend to rely more on their phones' auto lock feature compared to younger users, a new UBC study has found. They also prefer using PINs over fingerprints to unlock their phones.

Proof of Stake Blockchain protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consensus on the data, but they can be vulnerable to faults when validators accidentally or maliciously withhold their votes. SUTD researchers studied weighted voting and designed an algorithm to enhance their security.

In a paper presented at the recent IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, MIT researchers detail a system that, for the first time, automatically generates optimized cryptography code that's usually written by hand. Deployed in early 2018, the system is now being widely used by Google and other tech firms.

Thanks to fruitful collaboration between language scholars and machine learning specialists, a new application developed by researchers at the University of Eastern Finland and Linnaeus University in Sweden can detect Twitter bots independent of the language used.

Speculative memory side-channel attacks like Meltdown and Spectre are security vulnerabilities in computers. No efficient solutions have been found. Existing solutions only address specific security threats without solving the underlying issue. Now, researchers from University of Murcia, Uppsala University and NTNU have come up with a more appealing solution, which will be presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) at the end of June.

The framework proposed by the researchers will help government and industry organizations visualize how well they out-maneuver attacks over time. This groundbreaking work will be published in an upcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, a top cybersecurity journal.

Picture the future. You can hop in your car or one from a ride-share, buckle up and tell the car where you want to go. During your ride, you can look up a few things online through your dashboard. Meanwhile, your whereabouts and other details are being tracked. As self-driving cars develop further, they will play a much larger role in the digital economy as car companies and others harness personalized customer information through geospatial and navigation technologies, according to a Dartmouth study.

Cybersecurity researcher Karthik Pattabiraman, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of British Columbia, has developed an automated program aimed at foiling smart meter hacking and boosting security in the smart grid.