Redmond had earlier said that Windows would block SHA-1 signed TLS (Transport Layer Security) certificates from January 1, 2017, but is now mulling moving up the date to June.

There have been concerns about the algorithm’s security as researchers have proven that a forged digital certificate that has the same SHA-1 hash as a legitimate one can be created. Users can then be tricked into interacting with a spoofed site in what is called a hash collision.

In October, a team of cryptoanalysts warned that the SHA-1 standard should be withdrawn as the cost of breaking the encryption had dropped faster than expected to US$75,000 to $120,000 in 2015 using freely available cloud computing.

Programme manager for Microsoft Edge Kyle Pflug wrote in his blog that Redmond will coordinate with other browser vendors to evaluate the impact of this timeline based on telemetry and current projections for feasibility of SHA-1 collisions.

Mozilla said in October that in view of recent attacks it was considering a cut-off of July 1, 2016 to start rejecting all SHA-1 SSL certificates, regardless of when they were issued, ahead of an earlier scheduled date of January 1, 2017.

Courtesy- http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/microsoft-to-block-sha-1-hashing.html

The carrier also announced it is creating a new dedicated network core for IoT connections that can scale far beyond the ability of its existing networks with the intent to reach billions of sensors and devices.

“Continued innovation in smart cities, connected cars and wearables demonstrates that IoT is the future for how we will live and work,” said Mike Lanman, senior vice president of enterprise products at Verizon during an event held at Verizon’s San Francisco Innovation Center. He said Verizon is taking a “holistic approach” to help expand the IoT market from millions of connections to billions. The event was webcast.

Other major wireless carriers, including AT&T, are developing programs to offer a range of services to industries and cities for connecting IoT sensors to wireless networks and then to cloud services for data analysis.

At Verizon, Lanman said the company is working to lower the cost of connecting billions of existing devices that companies have used for years to Verizon’s network. Holding up a new computer chip made by Sequans Communications, an LTE chip maker, he said the chip will provide a “significant reduction in cost…that changes the game.” It will provide 4G LTE connectivity in modules connected to IoT devices to “make the wide-area network more accessible to developers.”

Also, next year Verizon will launch a new IoT core network within its LTE network to provide a “much lower cost” than with Verizon’s existing wired and wireless networks.

“The cost for an IoT module and the cost to connect will both drop dramatically,” Lanman added. “Whether you are connecting your dog or water meters and any other low-payload devices, we’ll handle it through a new IoT core.”

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/consumer-category/verizon-launches-thingspace-for-iot-development.html

ABI has added up the numbers and divided by its shoe size and multiplied by the age of its youngest child and worked out that China’s IoT market will grow more than five times in the next five years, exceeding $41 billion by 2020.

Dan Shey, VP and IoT practice director at ABI Research said that driving China’s IoT numbers is the smart meter segment.

“It leads all other segments in both connections and revenues. In fact, by 2020, smart meter connections will exceed the next highest market segment in total connections by nearly 10 to 1.”

Other major segments driving the China IoT market are home security and automation, OEM telematics, video surveillance, home appliances, aftermarket telematics and home monitoring.
Home monitoring is expected to become an important market in China as it attempts to care for its aging population, which will reach nearly 340 million people in 2020 for citizens age 55 and older.

“Data analytics revenues will generate the most IoT revenues in China. This statistic is reflective of the sheer volume of smart meter connections,” Shey said.

This is indicative of the relative lack of revenues in both platform and professional services in the China market.

“Platform revenues are not as high due to, for example, a higher share of proprietary embedded telematics deployments, especially by domestic OEM brands. Professional services revenues are similarly not as high, not only due to fewer connections in the telematics segments, with a higher proportion of tethered solutions, but also because IT and consultancy services are not as mature a market segment as in some of the more developed world markets such as Japan, South Korea and the US,” he wrote.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/is-china-the-fastest-growing-market-for-iot.html

The chipmaker was the only major chip provider to optimize its architecture for Windows Phone, and Microsoft’s Lumia devices, which run on Snapdragon 808 and 810 chips.

The Windows 10 devices which come to market later this year will have the option to integrate cellular connectivity with the X12, X7 or X5 LTE modems, which support the Microsoft operating system’s native Mobile Broadband Interface Model (MBIM).

Qualcomm said this would give business users, in particular, a similar experience on their large-screened devices as on their smartphones, giving the particular examples of location-based services and security driving LTE usage on PCs and tablets.

Integrated cellular connectivity has not been so important for notebook users, outside of a few scenarios such as WiFi-less trains, most wireless access from notebooks, and even tablets, is over a WLAN.

Qualcomm makes WiFi chips for portable devices but it does not have such a big market share. Working with Microsoft means it could have a higher presence and a far better chance of delivering mass sales. The Surface Pro and its new Surface Book, is getting good reviews and might even be popular.

Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/qualcomm-goes-lte-for-microsoft.html

The company recommended deleting the apps but did not name them, which may make it hard for people to know which apps put their data at risk.

The apps in question installed their own digital certificates on a person’s Apple mobile device. It would enable the apps to terminate an encrypted connection between a device and a service and view the traffic, which is a potential security risk.

Most websites and many apps use SSL/TLS (Secure Socket Layer/Transport Security Layer), a protocol that encrypts data traffic exchanged with a user. SSL/TLS is a cornerstone of Web security, ensuring data traffic that is intercepted is unreadable.

It is possible in some cases to interfere with an encrypted connection. Many enterprises that want to analyze encrypted traffic for security reasons will use SSL proxies to terminate a session at the edge of their network and initiate a new one with their own digital certificate, allowing them to inspect traffic for malicious behavior.

In that scenario, employees would likely be more aware or expect that kind of monitoring. But people downloading something from the App Store probably would have no idea of the access granted to their sensitive data traffic.

Apple checks applications to ensure that malicious ones are not offered in its store. Those checks are in large part the reason why Apple has had fewer problems with malicious mobile applications in its store.

Installing digital certificates isn’t itself a malicious action per se, but Apple may be concerned that users are not fully aware of the consequences of allowing an app to do so.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/apple-removes-data-spying-apps-from-store.html

Researchers from FireEye found that the malicious component, nicknamed Kemoge, has been seeded inside what appear to be legitimate apps offered on third-party application stores.

“This is another malicious adware family, possibly written by Chinese developers or controlled by Chinese hackers, spreading on a global scale that represents a significant threat,” wrote Yulong Zhang, a staff research scientist with FireEye.

Whomever created Kemoge repackaged legitimate apps with the malware and then promoted them on websites and through in-app ads to persuade people to download them.

Zhang listed a dozed affected apps: Sex Cademy, Assistive Touch, Calculator, Kiss Browser, Smart Touch, Shareit, Privacy Lock, Easy Locker, 2048kg, Talking Tom 3, WiFi Enhancer and Light Browser.

Third-party apps stores are considered risky places to download Android apps, as hackers frequently upload malicious apps to them. Google performs a security check on apps in its Play store, although harmful ones occasionally sneak in.

Kemoge not only displays unwanted ads, but it’s also loaded with eight root exploits that target a wide range of Android devices, Zhang wrote. A successful attack using those exploits means an attacker would have complete control over the device.

Kemoge will collect a device’s IMEI (International Mobile Station Equipment Identity) and IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) numbers, information on storage and apps, and send the information to a remote server.

That command-and-control server was still running, Zhang wrote. An analysis of traffic exchanged between an infected device and the server showed Kemoge also tries to uninstall antivirus apps.

FireEye came across an app called Shareit in Google’s Play store that was signed by the same digital certificate as the malicious one found on the third-party source.

The Google Play version of ShareIt did not have the eight root exploits or contact the command-and-control server, but it did have some of the same Kemoge code libraries. It now appears to be gone from Google Play.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/kemoge-malware-menacing-android-phones.html

IBM scientists demonstrated a new way to shrink transistor contacts in chips, thus speeding up the replacing of silicon transistors with carbon nanotubes which the firm has been working on for several years.

The company said that the breakthrough brings it closer to creating fully scaled carbon nanotube technology that will power future computing technologies while increasing performance and “opening a pathway to dramatically faster, smaller and more powerful chips”.

Carbon nanotube chips have many benefits over traditional silicon. Transistors in silicon are approaching a point of physical limitation. They have been made smaller year after year, but shrinking the size of the transistor, including the channels and contacts, without compromising performance is becoming increasingly difficult.

Carbon nanotube chips could improve the capabilities of high-performance computers because they allow these contacts to be so small that they are virtually transparent.

This means that the size of the semiconductor can decrease dramatically, while the substrate of carbon nanotubes makes the chip more energy efficient and is a soft and flexible material that could allow new device form factors.

Shu-jen Han, IBM’s manager of nanoscale science and technology, told us in an interview that wearable technology is one of the most exciting areas that this technology could transform owing to the unique property of the substrate, allowing new form factors with better performance and battery life.

However, the breakthrough isn’t about the carbon nanotube material being a better replacement for silicon, but more of an engineering innovation that addresses part of the problem in successfully rolling out better performing and more efficient chips.

“We know what the issue has been, and the limits of the technology, for years. What we solved here is a device-level issue, a one-dimensional structure. We need to make a wafer of them, a high-quality wafer, which does not exist yet,” Shu-jen said.

The next stage for IBM’s research group is to scale up the carbon nanotube technology to make reliable mass produced chips before they can make a difference to businesses and consumers.

Shu-jen said this could take five to 10 years, but could enable big data to be analysed faster and allow cloud data centres to deliver services more efficiently and economically.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/ibm-makes-carbon-nanotube-breakthrough.html