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PC Monitors Vulnerable To Hacking
You should probably be leery of what you see since, apparently, your computer monitor can be hacked.
Researchers at DEF CON presented a way to manipulate the tiny pixels found on a computer display.
Ang Cui and Jatin Kataria of Red Balloon Security were curious how Dell monitors worked and ended up reverse-engineering one.
They picked apart a Dell U2410 monitor and found that the display controller inside can be used to change and log the pixels across the screen.
During their DEF CON presentation, they showed how the hacked monitor could seemingly alter the details on a web page. In one example, they changed a PayPal’s account balance from $0 to $1 million, when in reality the pixels on the monitor had simply been reconfigured.
It wasn’t exactly an easy hack to pull off. To discover the vulnerability, both Cui and Kataria spent their spare time over two years, conducting research and understanding the technology inside the Dell monitor.
However, they also looked at monitors from other brands, including Samsung, Acer and Hewlett Packard, and noticed that it was theoretically possible to hack them in the same manner as well.
The key problem lies in the monitors’ firmware, or the software embedded inside. “There’s no security in the way they update their firmware, and it’s very open,” said Cui, who is also CEO of Red Balloon.
The exploit requires gaining access to the monitor itself, through the HDMI or USB port. Once done, the hack could potentially open the door for other malicious attacks, including ransomware.
For instance, cyber criminals could emblazon a permanent message on the display, and ask for payment to remove it, Kataria said. Or they could even spy on users’ monitors, by logging the pixels generated.
However, the two researchers said they made their presentation to raise awareness about computer monitor security. They’ve posted the code to their research online.
“Is monitor security important? I think it is,” Cui said.
Dell couldn’t be reached for immediate comment.
Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/computer-monitors-are-also-vulnerable-to-hacking.html
Can Intel Go Wireless?
July 17, 2014 by admin
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Intel wants to lead the drive into a less wired world by pushing standards, drive down the cost, and make these technologies ubiquitous.
At Computex, Intel demonstrated WiGig wireless docking and simultaneous wireless charging of a laptop, smartphone, headset and tablet with a pad placed under a tabletop. The company said that it would deliver reference designs for systems that use the technology in 2016 as part of a future Core processor family known as Skylake.
WiGig trades range for speed and operates in the 60GHz spectrum, compared with 2.4- and 5.0GHz for WiFi. It can transfer data at speeds of up to 7Gbps, compared to a maximum speed of a little more than 1Gbps for 802.11ac.
WiGig can be used to stream video from a mobile device to a TV or monitor, replacing HDMI and DisplayPort cables, but is being seen as a way of carrying out networking and wireless docking. It means that you can put your laptop on your desk and it automatically connects with your monitor, keyboard and mouse, printer and other peripherals without cables.
Intel plans to make its own WiGig chips. The outfit said it will have silicon for both transmitters and receivers in production by the end of this year, and available in products in the first half of 2015. Intel also wants to push Rezence for wireless charging.
Chipzilla has added that it will contribute some of its own IP to expand the standard to support wireless charging of laptops (which requires at least 20 watts) and that Rezence will be part of a Skylake reference design by 2016. This means that the world could be wirelessly networked soon after that.
What Do Smaller Controllers Mean?
If you want a wearable Internet of Things, the electronics have to be as tiny and as energy efficient as possible. That’s why a new microcontroller by Freescale Semiconductor is noteworthy.
The company has produced the Kinetis KLO3 MCU, a 32-bit ARM system that is 15% smaller than its previous iteration but with a 10% power improvement.
Internet of Things is a buzzword for the trend toward network-connected sensors incorporated into devices that in the past were standalone appliances. These devices use sensors to capture things like temperatures in thermostats, pressure, accelerometers, gyroscopes and other types of MEMS sensors. A microcontroller unit gives intelligence and limited computational capability to these devices, but is not a general purpose processor. One of the roles of the microcontroller is to connect the data with more sophisticated computational power.
The Kinetis KLO3 runs a lightweight embedded operating system to connect the data to other devices, such as an app that uses a more general purpose processor.
Kathleen Jachimiak, product launch manager at Freescale, said the new microcontroller will “enable further miniaturization” in connected devices. This MCU is capable of having up to 32 KB of flash memory and 2 KB of RAM.
Consumers want devices that are light, small and smart. They also want to be able to store their information and send it to an application that’s either on a phone or a PC, Jachimiak said.
This microcontroller, at 1.6 x 2.0 mm, is smaller than the dimple on a golf ball, and uses a relatively new process in its manufacturing, called wafer level chip scale packaging. The process involves building the integrated package while the die is still part of a wafer. It’s a more efficient process and produces the smallest possible package, for a given die size.
New USB Chip Developed
October 18, 2013 by admin
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Silicon Motion says it has begun shipping samples of a new USB 3.0 controller chip for flash drives that could boost performance by up to 50%.
The company said the new SM3267 integrated controller is expected to deliver up to 160MB/s read, and 60MB/s write speeds through a single channel; that would be a 30% to 50% performance improvement over today’s USB 3.0 flash drive technology.
Even though the USB 3.0 specification has the capability to support 4.8Gbps throughput speeds, the speed of a USB 3.0-enabled flash drive is dictated by the speed of the accessing flash devices in the drive. Today, most consumer-USB 3.0 flash drives support about 100MB/s read speeds.
We are pleased to announce that SM3267 has received design-ins from most of our current USB controller customers, including many top-tier OEMs, and we expect SM3267-based USB 3.0 flash drives will be commercially available starting in the fourth quarter of 2013,” Wallace Kou, CEO of Silicon Motion, said in a statement.
The new integrated chip will also be able to run at lower voltages, from 5 volts to 1.2 volts, enabling a 25% to 30% lower USB flash drive device temperature compared with other USB 3.0 flash controller products in the market, Silicon Motion said.
The new IC will support the vast majority of NAND flash technology, including new triple-level cell (TLC), multi-level cell (MLC), high speed Toggle, and ONFI DDR NAND manufactured by Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk, SK Hynix, Micron and Intel.
The new chip has already passed both USB-IF compliance testing and WHCK (Windows Hardware Certification Kit) tests for Windows 7 and Windows 8.
The new IC is available in a Chip-on-Board (COB) and in a 48-pin QFN green package.