News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Using brain data, eye-tracking data and field-study data, researchers have confirmed something about our interaction with security warnings on computers and phones: the more we see them, the more we tune them out. But they've also found that slight changes to the appearance of warnings help users pay attention to and adhere to warnings 20 percent more of the time.

One out of at least 10 patients records doctors' visits, usually on a cell phone, Apple recently released a new Health Records feature built into the Health app as part of iOS 11.3. No longer a wave of the future, Dartmouth Institute researchers, and their patient co-author, analyze the benefits of digital recordings of healthcare visits, the need to create a new model of health data ownership, and potential cybersecurity threats

A research team from the University of Applied Sciences (FH) in Münster, Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven has demonstrated that the two most common email encryption standards are vulnerable to attacks. Their attack, referred to as Efail, proved successful in 25 out of 35 tested email programs using the S/MIME encryption standard and in 10 out of 28 tested programs using OpenPGP.

Simultaneous experiments on five continents challenge Einstein's principle of local realism. Participants contributed to the experiment generating more than 90 million bits, unpredictably choosing among measurements to escape a paradox known as the 'freedom-of-choice loophole'. The study has been published in Nature.

While we embrace the way the Internet of Things already is making our lives more streamlined and convenient, the cybersecurity risk posed by millions of wirelessly connected gadgets, devices and appliances remains a huge concern. Even single, targeted attacks can result in major damage; when cybercriminals control and manipulate several nodes in a network, the potential for destruction increases.

The physics involved with stirring a liquid operate the same way as the mathematical functions that secure digital information. This parallel could help in developing even more secure ways of protecting digital information.

Overall, the results demonstrated that in a real-life friendship scenario we can detect people who have the strongest friendship ties as well as malicious users, even on Twitter,' the researchers say. 'Our method outperforms other anomaly detection methods and we believe that it has considerable potential for a wide range of applications particularly in the cyber-security arena.'