NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Silence Turned Into Secret Skype Messages

A team of encryption specialists has figured out a way to communicate with each other using silence. No, it's not a Cold War era spy trick, but it's still very tricky. Welcome to SkypeHide.

The group that created the technique for SkypeHide was led by Wojciech Mazurczyk, an assistant professor of computer networks and switching at the Warsaw University of Technology. Mazurczyk and his colleagues specialize in network steganography. Spy nerds know that's the science of hiding information and messages within computer networks.

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SkypeHide works using something called "packet hijacking." Mazurczyk, along with Maciej Karaś and Krzysztof Szczypiorski, found that whenever we use Skype, the program keeps sending 70-bit data packets during the silences that occur within a conversation. So the computer scientists put their own secret messages into those data packets, according to Nancy Owano at Phys.org.

Mazurczyk told Owano, "The secret data is indistinguishable from silence-period traffic, so detection of SkypeHide is very difficult." This opens up the potential to transmit secret text, audio files and even video during a red herring conversation that's happening. At best, the speed for transmitting these secret messages was 1 kilobit per second, which isn't superfast but could be fast enough to communicate something important.

Spy techniques can backfire, though. What if this technique gets into the wrong hands? Hopefully that long pause between birthday greetings doesn't end up being an ideal time for terrorists to touch base. If secret messages are discovered and have a criminal connection, a law enforcement entity could compel Skype to share messages stored temporarily on its server.

Skype does tells its users to be careful. As much as the site tries to protect users, the site can't guarantee their safeguards "will prevent every unauthorized attempt to access, use or disclose personal information."

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More answers may be forthcoming later this summer, when the Warsaw University of Technology group plans to present SkypeHide at the ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security in Montpellier, France. In the meantime, if you want to send some secret spy messages, there's always the classics: a red flag in the flowerpot or the chalk mark on the mailbox.

Credit: Hotblack

How Your Secret E-Mail Can Give You Up

Say, hypothetically speaking, you want to engage in some confidential correspondence with a high-ranking government official. You both know to set up dummy Web-mail accounts that don't link back to your real names, maybe even to confine your chatter to messages saved in a shared account's drafts folder.

What could possibly go wrong?

As recently resigned CIA director David Petraeus and author Paula Broadwell have discovered to their detriment, everything.

I hope none of you are having affairs with people running three-letter agencies, but you'd still rather keep your messages out of the sight of strangers. You may not even want your name attached to your e-mail. Good luck, because any of the following six factors can defeat that attempt.

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1. The Internet Protocol address of whatever computer you send an e-mail from will be logged by your e-mail server (without that step, the message can't go anywhere on the Internet) and then recorded in the message's headers. (You can inspect these usually-hidden details with commands like Gmail's "Show Original.") That "IP" will identify your Internet connection and, to varying degrees, your location, as you can see at sites like What Is My IP Address. One of Broadwell's bigger mistakes was apparently connecting from hotels, which allowed investigators to cross-reference guest records.

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(You can cloak your IP using anonymity services like the Tor Project. Why the head of an intelligence agency didn't think to use one is unclear, not least since the U.S. government has backed the development of online tools to resist the intrusion of totalitarian regimes.)

2. Keylogging software stashed on your computer by a virus could record everything you write, not just in any one e-mail. That's always a game-over scenario.

3. Strange Wi-Fi can rat you out. A maliciously-run network will log all of your Internet traffic; an unencrypted one will make it easy for a snoop on the same signal to listen in.

4. The recipient's computer is subject to every one of the above risks.

5. The recipient could decide on his or her own that your privacy is no longer worth protecting and forward your e-mail to somebody else. (Some encrypted messaging services allow you to send self-destructing messages, but a computer's screen-capture function--or the lower-tech workaround of pointing a camera at its screen--will work around them.)

6. The government could take an interest in your correspondence. That's the biggest risk of all: By the letter of a 1986 law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, that has aged poorly, the feds only need a prosecutor's authorization -- not a judge's -- to obtain messages that your provider has stored for more than 180 days on its servers.

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In practice, you may have a little more security, as Electronic Frontier Foundation staffers explained in a post last week. But there sure are a lot of government requests for user data going around; Google keeps count of these, and the U.S. is far ahead of every other country. In the first half of 2012, Google received 7,969 requests targeting 16,281 users, 90 percent of which it complied with at least partially.

All that said, the FBI probably just isn't that into you, and neither is the average online crook. But no matter how clean you keep your computer and your connections, you can't guarantee that a recipient will keep your words private. So choose them with care.

Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery

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Digital Sound Tech Used To Study Rare Owls

Digital sound systems have moved from the living room to the forest. In Yosemite, Calif., researcher are using digital mp3 recorders to used to study a rare species of great gray owl.

Trapping and banding them is traumatic for the birds, and the Joe Medley, a PhD candidate in ecology at the University of California, Davis, wanted to find a way to avoid that. So Medley decided to use digital audio recorders to pick up the owl's calls.

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The recorders are called Autonomous Recording Units (ARUs) are powered by batteries and have two-high gain microphones. The ARUs are put inside waterproof cases and hung off of tree branches. They can record for about two weeks at a time. The particular ones Medley used were purpose-built, but there are commercial versions available, he said. (The detectors are only six to eight feet off the ground, so no tree-climbing was needed).

At first he ended up with 50 terabytes of owl calls mixed with background sounds. So the next step was to tease out the owls' calls. That required sophsticated software, Medley told Discovery News. It's called Raven Pro, developed by the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. Medley had to write the owl-specific parts of the program himself, though. The algorithm he developed searched recording data for a certain amplitude -- essentially, the amount of energy in the sound -- within certain times and frequencies.

"The detectors are very good at detecting target signals, but also detect a lot of false positives, so we had to develop a secondary processing method where we used a classifier (using a statistics program) to differentiate actual owl calls," Medley wrote in an email. 

The program could ultimately pick out males and females from juveniles, and even identify nesting females calling for food. The results are still being analyzed.

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Great gray owls are the largest owls in North America, and the ones in Yosemite are a subspecies that split off from their cousins relatively recently -- during the last ice age, about 30,000 years ago. Great gray owls generally are more common, with a range that extends through much of Canada and the taiga forests in Asia. But the group in Yosemite seems to be a genetically distinct population. They also have differences in behavior such as where they build nests, migrate and what they eat. Only about 200 still exist today, and they face threats from humans such as habitat destruction.

Medley added that while owls have relatively low-frequency calls, the technology could also be applied to other animals as well, such as frogs, that have distinctive noises. The methods would be the same -- the only difference would be what the software is programmed to pick up.

Credit: National Park Service / Joe Medley

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James Bond Tech Still Beyond Our Reach

Fifty years ago this month, Dr. No premiered in theaters, the first installment of the James Bond series that would stretch 22 films to date with another installment, Skyfall, due to premiere this year.

The James Bond movies gave sixties audiences not only the vicarious thrill of following 007 through dangerous missions in exotic locales, but also a glimpse of the future through some of the technology used by Bond and the villains he pursued.

Despite the decades between the imagined Bond universe and the real world today, Bond and the supervillains he confronted still have the edge in terms of technology now available today.

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Homing Devices

In order for MI6 headquarters to keep tabs on 007's location, he has on several occasions had to carry some kind of homing device with tracking capability on his person.

In Thunderball, Bond brought with him a homing pill that activated when it was swallowed and emitted a frequency that could only be tracked with specialized equipment. Most recently in Casino Royale, Bond was implanted with a homing chip that not only tracked his whereabouts but also monitored his vitals.

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Although GPS tracking is virtually ubiquitous in cell phones today, a device the size of a small chip or a pill with GPS-tracking capabilities just doesn't exist yet. There is existing technology for implantable radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, like the microchips implemented in animals. Those, however, are only passive RFID and require a specialized scanner in close proximity.

Space Base

The climatic scenes in Moonraker take place on the space station of supervillian industrialist Hugo Drax. The space station is large enough for Bond, Drax, Bond's squeeze Dr. Holly Goodhead, Jaws and an untold number of henchman, all floating in simulated gravity in suborbital spaceflight. It has to be big, after all, given Drax's play to essentially use the station as an arc while he poisons all of humanity. Despite its size, Drax even has a radar jammer capable of hiding his massive suborbital hideout.

Although the International Space Station might be the closest comparison to the space base from Moonraker, the 21st-century station is nowhere near Drax's base in terms of scale or capability.

If you're going to take on a villain in space, conventional weapons just won't do. That's why in Moonraker, Bond was armed with a handheld laser gun.

Laser weapons already exist in various forms. As Craig Freudenrich writing for HowStuffWorks.com explains, high-energy lasers and other weapons, such as the Airborne Laser and the PHaSR, have been tested for possible military applications. However, a handheld, laser-burst gun isn't yet available today.

Cigarette-sized rocket

Given how often Bond can get himself into a jam, he often needs a lot of firepower in a small package when he's backed into a corner.

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Laser handguns

In You Only Live Twice, Bond wielded a rocket concealed into a tiny cigarette. Despite its size, the rocket was accurate within 30 yards and proved to be a lethal projectile.

In reality, no rocket has yet been developed that has that much firepower in such a small package. Even in a more conventional design like the shape of a gun, as demonstrated here by what might be the world's smallest gun, a firing mechanism that size can't really generate the force necessary to create the kind of stopping power wielded by 007.

Satellite-based weaponry

As difficult as a small-scale weapon might be to duplicate, no one has come close to the space weaponry developed by Bond villians.

Diamonds Are Forever marked the first time such a device was employed in which the laser used diamonds to concentrate light into an accurate and widely destructive weapon. In Goldeneye, an orbital satellite produced shock waves that created an electromagnetic pulse in a target area to destroy any electronic devices on the ground.

Count this as one Bond device we're happy to see on screen, but not in real life.

Photo credit: Corbis Images

Mind-Reading Helmet To Reveal Your Crimes

Remember when 'thoughtcrimes' were just little spoonfuls of spooky fiction George Owell whipped up? Well, my friends, get ready to dust off your dystopia because 'thoughtcrimes' are about to leap off the pages of "1984" and into your head.

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There to dragnet all your evil thoughts will be Veritas Scientific, a new website-less company that's creating a mind-reading helmet. If that's not enough to frighten you into thinking of nothing but rainbows, waterfalls and red magic satin until the end of days, then maybe this not-at-all demented quote by Veritas CEO Eric Elbot will.

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"The last realm of privacy is your mind," Elbot told IEEE Spectrum. “This will invade that.”

The helmet would be similar to a motorcycle helmet, though I'm envisioning more of a Daft Punk-style head piece. However, there will be no Digital Love pumping through the helmet, only metal brush sensors that will read brain activity as it responds to images flashed across the visor.

Under the guise that recognition indicates memory and memory implies knowledge, Veritas' aim is to develop an electroencephalogram (EEG) helmet that registers spikes in brain activity triggered by familiar images.

Who does Veritas want to go after? The enemy, of course. And who better to pitch a mind-reading helmet to than an organization rife with enemies: the U.S. military. Elbot imagines scenarios like this: Metallica-blasting U.S. troops roll into a remote village in Afghanistan and round up all the men and put helmets on them. By showing them images of bombs or Taliban fighters, U.S. troops would be able to find out who are enemy combatants or sympathizers by any spikes in brain activity. Surely, nothing could go wrong with such an air-tight plan as that, right?

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Elbot said he envisions the technology will be beneficial with law enforcement agencies, in criminal trials and corporate takeovers. Eventually, he says the technology will be available as smartphone apps for civilians. Though forgive me for being a little of suspicious of that happening anytime soon and for what purpose would it serve, besides creating interrogators out of us all? Still, at least Elbot recognizes the dangers of totalitarianism.

"Certainly it’s a potential tool for evil," Elbot said. "If only the government has this device, it would be extremely dangerous."

via IEEE Spectrum

Credit: Illustration Works/Corbis 

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For the Spy on Your List: Gift Guide 2011

If you know someone who's trying to stop an evil genius or evade capture from a group of well-organized, poorly trained criminals, and you have NO idea what buy them for the holidays, look no farther. Discovery's 2011 Gift Guide for the Wannabe Secret Agent offers suggestions that will please even the best secret-agent-wannabe on your list.

All good spies know how to capture video or pictures of the enemy. Without evidence, how will they escape the frame up? Luckily, the gift guide includes several options to secretly acquiring images.

Consider the worlds smallest camera by Hammacher Schlemmer, which is the size of a marble, weighs only half an ounce and can take 2-megapixel photos and video at 30 frames-per-second. It has automatic focus and only one button for simple operation in the field. Hopefully, it doesn't get too dangerous, because the camera comes with a lifetime guarantee. It's priced at $99.95.

Even smaller is the digital video pen-camera from The Sharper Image while infiltrating the embassy. Record your target's next meeting and get it on YouTube before he releases the poison gas. Piece of mind for $99.99.

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If it's a document hoard your spy has uncovered, he will need The Sharper Image's portable scanning wand, too. Much less bulky than the average scanner/printer/fax machine at the office, the wand is only six inches long and, with a wave, can scan documents or photos, saving up to 16 GB worth of documentation. It's also $99.99.

Once the covert data is stored on a safe-house computer, your agent will want to keep the digital data from being compromised. The Eikon Solo Fingerprint Reader from AuthenTec goes beyond password protection, providing access to computer files only to the person whose fingerprint has been stored in its memory. Get it for $19.99.

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A good secret agent knows that while going under cover is essential, so is looking good. A bulletproof jacket by Miguel Caballero (alias: "Armani of bulletproof clothing") will keep your spy looking suave -- and free of holes. This bit of sexy protection is available as a vest, jacket, button-down and even a t-shirt.

Being prepared for that last-minute trip to Berlin is crucial for the aspiring cloak-and-dagger. What better place to store small pieces of equipment than in a ThinkGeek book vault? No one will ever expect that the dogeared copy of How To Win Friend's and Influence People contains valuables. Available from ThinkGeek for $34.99.

For the DIY MacGyver, the Discovery gift guide even includes Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction 2. If Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction wasn't enough, why not grab the sequel? With blowguns, periscopes, catapults and bugging equipment your agent never be without the right tool for the job. Perk: everything in these hallowed pages can be constructed with household items and office supplies. The guide is only $16.95.

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Once a mission is complete, every secret agent needs to make a hasty getaway. Few getaways could be more hasty than one in a Corvette Speed Boat. Marine Technology Incorporated might sound like a front company, but they're legit. The speed boat was inspired by a Corvette and looks the part. For only $1.7 million, the ZR1 sports 2,700 horsepower and an 8,000-watt audio system complete with Wi-Fi and AppleTV. In case you're balking at the price, it comes with a trailer. You supply the water.

The only thing the gift guide doesn't provide is a good pun for the moment when your agent triumphs over his or her worthy adversary.

Image: ThinkGeek, AuthenTec, ThinkGeek, Pier57

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Want more like this? See all our end of year stories for 2011. Gift guides, top 10 lists and some of the best of will be 2011 chosen by you!

Bionic Eye Magnifies Images 200X for TV

SpyClops Bionic Eye: $39.99

Dozens of otherwise ordinary items around the house are ready for their close-up and they don't even know it. Using the SpyClops Bionic Eye, arm hair looks like in those 'lift and cut' graphics in shaving commercials. (Jakks Pacific recommends not shaving while using the product.) You can see special microprinting on paper money. And Cheerios...let's just say you won't ever look at them the same.

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After inserting five AA batteries (you supply) and plugging the composite video cable into your TV, you're ready to go. Put the device right up to whatever object you'd like to see magnified. If the image is blurry, tilt or swivel the lens attachment -- or pull away slightly from the object. As part of the SpyNet series, it comes with four 'secret documents.' You can use the SpyClops to locate text hidden within them and upload your findings. It's a great way for kids to use a bionic eye without having to crash test a rocket and be rebuilt for several million dollars.

Credit: Jakks Pacific

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New Radar Could Give Soldiers X-Ray Vision

X-ray vision is possible for Superman, but in the real world, it’s a lot harder to do. However, a couple of guys at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a way to duplicate –- sort of -– Superman’s amazing feats.

Two researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Lab, John Peabody and Gregory Charvat, think they have a way around that, and it involves a system of signal amplifiers and radio wavelengths. The results could lead to a new kind of radar that offers real X-ray vision to soldiers in urban combat zones.

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To see through walls, you have to deal with the fact that solid objects absorb, scatter or reflect light and radio waves. This is why X-ray machines and radar work the way they do. When a doctor takes an X-ray image, the solid bone (and any metal you are carrying) shows up as bright white because other body parts, which are mostly water, allow X rays to pass through them, whereas bones and metal don’t. Radar works by picking up reflected radio waves from (mostly) metal objects. A radar operator can “see” a plane from miles away because of the radio waves bouncing off it.

If one uses an X-ray machine to take an image of an object behind a wall, the wall shows up very brightly. Only a small bit of the radiation penetrates the wall, and an even smaller bit reflects back to the detector.

Peabody and Charvat came up with the idea of amplifying the faint signal that does make it through, and subtracting out the signal produced by a concrete wall (above).

The first problem wasn’t that hard, as signal amplifiers are easy to make. Teasing out an image from the reflected radiation was the challenge. Longer wavelengths pass through solids more easily (this is one reason your radio works inside your house). But the longer the wavelength, the bigger your antenna has to be and the slower the data is transmitted.

The researchers chose the wavelength they did because it is small enough that the radar apparatus can be about eight feet long. Then they looked at how to filter the signal and see what is behind the wall. When a radio signal passes through a wall, hits something and bounces back, it’s wavelength changes. Using an analog crystal filter, they were able to build a receiver that will only pick up signals of the altered wavelength. That effectively deletes the wall from the image.

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Right now their device shows people as blobs beyond the wall, but they hope to improve it. As it is, they're able to take video at about 11 frames per second.

There are some limitations: the way the device takes images is by subtracting certain signals and comparing it to a previous image, so anything that isn’t moving will not show up. That means a person would look like an inanimate object, provided they stay still.

But even in its raw state, it can still help first responders look through walls to see if anyone is in a building -– or aid soldiers in urban combat zones. It was the latter that Peabody and Charvat had in mind when they designed it. To that end they are working on improving the image quality to make the system more user-friendly.

Via MIT News

Images: David Waldorf/Getty Images and MIT Lincoln Lab

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Virus Hits U.S. Military Drones

Perhaps it was inevitable: the drones the U.S. military uses have been hit by a computer virus. Worse yet, it’s a keylogger –- a piece of malware that sends every keystroke a user makes to someone else. And the virus has been doing it while soldiers were piloting their drones.

The virus was found on U.S. military computers at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, according to Wired. One mystery is how the virus got onto the computers in the first place, as they are not supposed to be connected to the Internet at all. It might well have been an accident, brought in on a removable drive or a CD. The military has restricted the use of removable media, but in order to update software or move data from one remote cockpit to the other, military personnel routinely use USB drives and CDs.

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Drones -- otherwise known as unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) -- play several roles in combat, and have become more important to the military in the last decade. That means the possibility that someone out there has important information is real. In 2009 insurgents’ computers were found that had days worth of video and audio. The breach happened because the video and audio feeds from the drones to the pilots weren’t encrypted.

It isn’t yet clear who the keylogger was sending the information to and there is also no evidence that any classified information left the system. The lack of connections between the Air Force computers and the Internet might mitigate the damage. But that’s no guarantee, as the very presence of the virus shows.

Also, removing the virus is proving to be something of a chore. Over the last few weeks, it's been resistant to efforts at removal.

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The incident highlights the kind of security threats that viruses and malware can pose. But previously the targets have been infrastructure -- notably via Stuxnet, which targeted an Iranian nuclear enrichment facility. That was a highly sophisticated piece of software, and many experts don’t seem to think a variant is likely to appear again. While attacks on infrastructure are scary, a piece of malware taking over a control system is more complex to write than the one stealing your credit card data.

But the combination of many types of malware (keyloggers are pretty common) and plain old carelessness could now threaten military operations more directly. A sobering thought.

Via Wired

Image: David Orlovic via Wikimedia Commons

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Spies Can Hide Secret Messages in Bacteria

Espionage just got a little more sophisticated and scientific. Invisible ink? Decoder rings? Lemon juice? Puh-lease -- that's mere child's play compared to what double agents scientists at Tufts University just created.

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Now secret messages can be hidden in genetically engineered bacteria, thanks to a new method called steganography by printed arrays of microbes, or SPAM. Developed by chemistry professor David Walt and his cloak-and-dagger team of researchers, this new method uses an assortment of E. coli strains modified with fluorescent proteins that glow in seven colors.

Multiply that number by the two colors each message character is encoded with, and spies like us have more than 49 possible code combinations. That's enough for the alphabet, plus digits 0 to 9, with room left over for a few extra symbols.

The secret microbial messages are first grown in petri dishes. The cultures are then transferred to a thin film and ready to be sent to the desired undercover recipient. To unlock the message, the recipient must transfer the bacteria to a genetically modified growth medium, which acts as the secret key.

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For example, the bacteria could be engineered to react only with a certain antibiotic, therefore allowing the message to be revealed only when in contact with that specific chemical. If any other chemical key is used, the message would be scrambled.

Self-destructing messages could also be created by using bacteria that loses its fluorescence over time.

[Via NewScientist]

Image: Tufts University 2011

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