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

Tiny Dragonfly UAV Flies and Hovers to Spy

You'd probably recognize a quadrocopter or a swarmbot swooping in for a closer view, but a tiny dragonfly might escape your notice. A Georgia Tech spinoff is betting their unmanned aerial dragonfly vehicle will leave other micro flying bots in the dust.

The Atlanta-based company TechJet started as a spinoff from developments in Georgia Tech's Robotics and Intelligent Machines Department. One of their projects, called Dragonfly, was initially developed with $1 million in funding from the U.S. Air Force's Office of Scientific Research. Since then, the Dragonfly prototypes have become smaller and there are now five technology patents on the design.

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TechJet, led by cofounders Jayant Ratti and Emanuel Jones, pictures different Dragonfly versions being used for gaming, dynamic photography, home security and military surveillance. Inspired by the way real dragonflies can fly and hover, they developed a four-winged robot weighing less than one ounce that can do the same.

Each Dragonfly has stereoscopic vision, flight control systems and a camera-ready operating system, according to the company. TechJet will be offering different options for robotics elements such as wings and actuators through its website, depending on what the user wants to do. For example, one version could be made more stable with better endurance for aerial photography.

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TechJet is currently raising money through the site Indiegogo with the goal of delivering the robots starting early next year. Dragonfly packages range from around $100 to $500 and include Wi-Fi and cameras at the high end.

So if you see a strange-looking insect flying your way, just be careful before you swat at it. That dragonfly could be a spy.

Image: A prototype for TechJet's robot dragonfly in action. Credit: TechJet.

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Jacket Has Pockets for Tablet, Phone and More

SeV Fleece Jacket 7.0: $160

Although for over a decade ScottEVest has produced a variety of snazzy tech-friendly clothing -- from vests and jackets to boxers, button-down shirts and even dresses -- their clever just-announced SeV Fleece Jacket 7.0 is special.

As expected, it's laden with numerous hidden pockets, so you can slickly store and transport myriad devices -- and keys, cards, documents, sunglasses, magazines, water bottles... But what's amazing is an attention to detail in its re-design and re-engineering that rivals that of even the fanciest devices it aims to carry. Every single feature and purposeful pocket has a specific function for enabling the mobile technology lifestyle, as epitomized by the exceptionally cool, patent-pending Quick Draw pocket.

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Behind a zipper on your left side lie dual compartments. Slide your phone face-up into the inner compartment, which has a clear plastic material on the other side. Then slide your hand into the silky soft outer compartment behind it, twist your wrist and you can use your phone. Mind you, it's not just that you can see your phone's display. You can fully interact with your touch screen, through voice commands, and by listening to calls or voicemail -- all without taking the phone out of your pocket!

But wait, it gets better. The inner compartment seals off with a little magnet. So once your phone is in place, it feels like you're simply slipping your hand into an ordinary side pocket (that just happens to have your phone concealed behind it). And on the other side, the flexible window to your phone is angled in a precise way that makes it possible to easily sneak a peek at your phone in either portrait or landscape position.

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Of course, because it's a ScottEVest, the Quick Draw pocket is part of your "Personal Area Network," which means you can thread earphones from it up through conduits in the jacket. Loops and pockets around your shoulder area keep your buds secure, hidden and always at the ready.

That's just one extended example of the level of details designed into this soft, warm, comfy jacket. Fortunately, one nice touch is that the jacket comes with a chamois (for cleaning glasses) that happens to have a map of the jacket's pockets printed on it. Other neat features worth noting are: the iPad pocket (also compatible with other tablets), the pickpocket-proof zippered pocket within a zippered pocket (great for a passport, cash or other valuables), and the fact that the sleeves zip off (and store in a long pocket that runs along your waist in the back).

This super fleece, available in either red or black, can currently be pre-ordered online and is slated to ship by the 31st.

Credit: ScottEVest

Scott Tharler writes about gadgets for Discovery News and covers travel tech for Fodor's. Follow him on Twitter, gdgt and Google Plus.

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Anti-Theft Fabric Raises the Alarm

Try getting out of this web, would-be thieves. German textile researchers have created an inexpensive anti-theft system out of smart fabric. Its threads link to a hidden alarm.

Research associate Erik Simon at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration in Berlin led the development of the system, made from a fine lattice of conductive threads. These silver-coated threads are connected to a microcontroller that detects when the fabric has been cut. Any cut prompts an alarm to go off.

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Simon and his colleagues say the new system could be used protect buildings, bank vaults and especially trucks with canvas that's vulnerable to thieves, according to the Institute. The fabric could be an added protective layer on a roof, on rafters and even used in combination with pressure sensors along along the floor.

Standard materials can be used to make the conductive parts, and the conductive thread can easily be incorporated into polyester that the textile industry already uses for fabrics. That should make the anti-theft fabric affordable and easy to produce in different sizes.

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The researchers say the current running through the threads is too weak to hurt humans or animals that inadvertently encounter it. But it's still strong enough to keep working after undergoing a battery of tests at the Institute. The fabric made it through testing in a washing machine and was exposed to extreme humidity and temperatures for long durations.

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"It didn’t fail once," Simon said in a release from the Institute. High-tech security systems aren't easy for everyone to obtain, especially when it comes to cost. Cheap smart fabric that can stand in for fancy cameras and sensors sounds like a potential win. Thieves won't see it coming.

Photo: This anti-theft fabric has conductive threads and a processor. Credit: Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration

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An Invisibility Cloak For Heat

Infrared sensors are able to peer into the night and see people in complete darkness because people give off body heat. But what if a person could wear clothing that makes their body heat silhouette invisible to infrared lenses?

Scientists in France are working on an invisibility cloak for heat and have reported their research in a recent issue of Optics Express. The technology could be used for military purposes to hide soliders from infrared detectors, but it could also work to thermally isolate circuits in computer chips, which would keep them cool.

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The team, lead by Sebastien Guenneau of the University of Aix-Marseille and colleagues at the French national research council, devised a mathematical model showing that a set of concentric rings, each one made of a material with differing diffusivity could cloak heat energy. Metal, for example, diffuses heat very well, while plastic doesn't. By alternating such materials, the heat flowed around the central region, essentially making it invisible. An infrared camera wouldn't pick it up because there would be no temperature difference between that region and its surroundings.

"The underlying idea is to guide heat around the region which you'd like to protect from thermal flux," Guenneau told Discovery News.

A key finding in this research is that the team realized cloaking heat would not require exotic, manmade materials, known as metamaterials, typically used to cloak objects from other kinds of light waves or even sound waves. That's good news for this kind of cloaking because it can use standard materials already available.

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Guenneau said the team didn't try to cloaking any human-sized objects from infrared light, though it's clear that the ability to shield them from infrared cameras would be of real interest to the military. Instead, their mathematical models focused micrometer-sized objects -- the size range of most electronic components inside computer chips. Keeping these components cool is of big interest to the electronic industry, which spends millions of dollars just trying to keep Internet servers from overheating, not to mention individual laptops.

The next step is to actually fabricate a device –- thus far the work has been in the area of mathematical modeling. It will take some work to find the materials that work best.

Credit: John Moore / Getty Images

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iPhone Has Night Vision With Adapter

iPhone Night Vision Adapter: $199

John Lennon claimed to have written the lyric, "What do you see when you turn out the light?" But most don't know that he originally answered his own musical question with: "I can't tell you, but I know I'd have an easier time if I had quick access to a state-of-the-art third-generation optical night vision accessory." A true visionary, he was clearly way ahead of his time. Because just a month and a half ago at the SHOT Show in Las Vegas, the iPhone Night Vision Adapter made its debut.

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This patent-pending accessory from US Night Vision is made for iPhone 4/S. It takes advantage of the mobile device's ability to capture decent audio, high-def video and high-quality stills...and pairs it with a night vision system that utilizes a laser rangefinder and doesn't give off an infrared signature. With the ability to add encryption and real-time streaming to share that media, you potentially have quite a powerful stealth reconnaisance pairing in the palm of your hand!

Chris Byrd, USNV's Vice President of Sales, revealed to Discovery News that the new version of the system -- due out in the next couple of weeks -- will incorporate an intermediary iPhone case. The super-tough multi-layer polycarbonate case has been designed for independent protection for everyday use on the low end. And on the high end, it will supposedly accommodate the extreme dampening necessary for using the system as a site on a live weapon firing rounds. Future accessories will allow for a variety of other mounts on people, equipment and vehicles.

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New USNV customers who buy one of their compatible products from them -- such as the popular AN/PVS-14A model pictured above, which starts around $3,900 -- will receive the case and adapter included. And branching out from Apple phones, Byrd told Discovery News that they're tracking six to eight other handsets, working to release a similar product within the next 30 days for the Samsung Galaxy SII Skyrocket. A Skyrocket that can see in the dark...look out!

Credit: US Night Vision

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A Cloak in Time Could Secure Networks

Making an object invisible in space? That’s been done. What about making one invisible in time?

At Cornell University, Alexander L. Gaeta and Moti Fridman led a team that experimented with making events invisible in time. Even though they only managed to mask a picosecond-scale event, the work points the way to making not only true cloaking devices, but better security over fiber-optic lines as well. Gaeta and Fridman first demonstrated the proof of concept in July, and now their work will be published in the journal Nature.

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To understand what they did first requires a look at what “ordinary” cloaking is like. In the last several years, scientists and engineers have been looking at how to make objects invisible. One method is to use refraction, the same property that causes prisms to split sunlight into the different colors of the rainbow. But instead of using an ordinary transparent material found in a prism to bend the light waves, scientists are using another class of materials, called metamaterials.

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These materials are engineered to have properties that may not be found in nature. For example, they can have a negative index of refraction, which makes light rays bend in a totally different way. A number of scientists have used these materials to bend light rays away from objects, essentially making them invisible. Because the bottom line is, if the light waves don't hit an object, it can't be seen.

But cloaking time is a whole nother thing. Instead of bending light waves around an object, the Cornell team slowed the light down on one side of an object, using a “time lens” that slowed wavelengths of light (think: red, blue, indigo, violet, etc.) and caused them to arrive at their destination at different times.

By passing the light through the time lens and then through a medium that dispersed it, they were able to create a gap in the light -- a time when no wavelength was visible. First one would see the shorter wavelengths (violet to blue and green), a gap, then the longer wavelengths (yellow to orange and red).  

Next, by sending the light through another medium that reversed the dispersion and then another time lens, the beam looked just as it did before. The gap would be stitched together, with no way to know that anything had happened.

It’s like breaking up a line of cars at a traffic signal, and then allowing the ones that were stopped to catch up with the rest and re-form a continuous line. To test their idea, the scientists sent a light pulse through the gap, at a different frequency from the reference beam. That pulse was nearly invisible.

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There isn’t a practical technology yet to take advantage of this phenomenon on a large scale -– the Cornell team created a gap of only 50 picoseconds. But combining this technique with the spatial invisibility could make it easier to come up with a true cloaking device.

Gaeta’s team used a fiber-optic cable as the dispersive medium. Such cables carry beams of light to transmit data. Using a setup like this one could break up a beam of light, creating gaps that should be invisible to an observer. If anyone tampers with the beam, though, the gaps would become visible, as it would disrupt the cloaking effect.

Image: Paul Aresu/Getty Images

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Finally! Mysterious Cipher Code Cracked

An international team of computer scientists has cracked a manuscript detailing rituals of an 18th-century German secret society.

The text, known as the Copiale Cipher, is a 105-page book that was written in a combination of elaborate symbols and Roman letters. Previous attempts to decode it had failed, and it was clear that the cipher being used was more sophisticated than most. It is located in the former East Germany and was signed by a “Philipp” in 1866.

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Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, collaborated with two colleagues, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden. They found that the text was in a sophisticated substitution cipher, which means that the letters one would expect were replaced with symbols.

Such ciphers are common in children’s games –- you might remember the “pigpen cipher” or shifting letters (making an "A" into a "C," a "B" into a "D" and so on) from grade school. The Copiale manuscript was a step above that. Knight and his team originally thought –- as had many others –- that the visible Roman letters in the text were the coded message. But when they tried replacing those letters with others, all they got was nonsense.

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That meant the symbols, or at least some of them, had to be what they were looking for. They tried the same thing on the unknown symbols. Again, they got nonsense, but the nonsense seemed to point to German as the original language.

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Knight and his team assumed they were starting with German, as the book is from Germany and “Philipp” is a German spelling. They then looked at the frequency of different symbols and where they occurred together. This technique is centuries old and depends on the fact that different languages have combinations of letters that are allowed (or not). For example, in English, “q” is followed by a “u” in all but a few very rare words (and those are all foreign borrowings). That gave the linguists a few letters, which in turn allowed them to pick out more. Eventually they were able to transcribe the whole text.

The team has only translated the first 16 pages, but what the Copiale cipher revealed was a set of rules and initiation rites for a secret society. Such societies were more common in the 18th and 19th centuries, both as political and social organizations. (Yale’s Skull and Bones society was one of these).

The technique used in the Copiale manuscript, however, has more serious uses than plumbing the secrets of a clandestine society that has long since disbanded. Knight notes that many of his algorithms can be used in machine translation (and often are) and can be applied to other unknown texts and languages.

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Knight also said he has been very interested in one of the most famous coded texts: the Voynich manuscript, which has also stumped cryptographers and linguists for nearly a century. The Voynich is similar to the Copiale in that it is clearly in a coded text, but nobody is sure what the original language was or about the nature of the cipher.

Via: Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi, Christiane Schaefer, New York Times

Image: Kevin Knight

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Multiple Shirt Pockets Stash Gadgets

SeV Button Down Shirt: $80

The early 90s called and left a message: Please return the fanny pack, and the phone holster. There's a much cooler way to carry around the gear that would otherwise help you look hip. And ironically, it's what looks like a normal cotton shirt. But this wrinkle-resistant, tech-enabled SeV Button Down Shirt is anything but "button-down."

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It's not only got several handy hidden pockets, but also literally pockets within pockets. For instance, inside the magnetically sealing external chest pocket, it's got separate compartments sized for a pen (so it doesn't dorkily stick out) and a smart phone. A little pocket hidden towards the bottom of the shirt in front makes a great money cache. And two stealth under-arm pockets are perfect hideaways for sunglasses, cameras, phones or music players. Best of all, they're connected to your Personal Area Network, meaning you're wired for sound and ready to jam wherever you and your classic-looking, gadget toting shirt may be.

Credit: SeV

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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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