News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Mobile apps that work with Bluetooth devices have an inherent design flaw that makes them vulnerable to hacking, new research has found.

In the first study of public health-related Facebook advertising, newly published in the journal Vaccine, researchers at the University of Maryland, the George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University show that a small group of anti-vaccine ad buyers has successfully leveraged Facebook to reach targeted audiences and that the social media platform's efforts to improve transparency have actually led to the removal of ads promoting vaccination and communicating scientific findings.

UMD researchers developed a tool called Geneva (short for Genetic Evasion), which automatically learns to circumvent censorship. Tested in China, India and Kazakhstan, Geneva found dozens of ways to circumvent censorship by exploiting gaps in censors' logic and finding bugs that the researchers say would have been virtually impossible to find manually. Geneva is being presented during a peer-reviewed talk at the Association for Computing Machinery's 26th Conference on Computer and Communications Security in London, November 14, 2019.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) security researchers Berk Sunar and Daniel Moghimi led an international team of researchers that discovered serious security vulnerabilities in computer chips made by Intel Corp. and STMicroelectronics. The flaws affect billions of laptop, server, tablet, and desktop users around the world. The proof-of-concept attack is dubbed TPM-Fail.

Free Internet access must be considered as a human right, as people unable to get online -- particularly in developing countries -- lack meaningful ways to influence the global players shaping their everyday lives, according to a new study.

The increasing number of devices connected over wireless networks is causing channels of information flow to be congested with heavy information traffic. But, these devices are resource-constrained and cannot support existing decongestion techniques. In a new study, scientists from Tokyo University of Science and Keio University have applied a certain machine-learning technique that can enable even these devices to adaptively choose freer channels for information flow.

With the presidential election season moving into high gear, campaign messaging will soon begin increasing dramatically. But for those of us who get our news from social media, a new study from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin offers a strong warning: You can't trust yourself to discern what's true and what's not when you're on Facebook.