mobile devices

WSJ: Samsung Looks To Iris Scans To Secure Mobile Devices

Min-Jeong Lee has an interesting article over at The Wall Street Journal Digits blog on how mobile device maker Samsung is looking to expand its use of biometric sensors in mobile devices beyond the finger-print scanners that are now the state of the art. According to the article, Samsung is considering “various types of biometric [mechanisms]” in addition to fingerprint scanners. Samsung’s senior vice president Rhee In-jong told analysts and investors at a forum in Hong Kong on Monday that iris scanners are a top consideration. “One of things that everybody is looking at is iris detection,” Rhee said. The biometric features are part of Samsung’s enterprise-focused mobile software, dubbed “Knox.”According to Rhee, only a small portion of some 80 million Samsung devices that shipped with the Knox software, which provides additional security functions for use by businesses, such as hardware based “TrustZone” technology to isolate sensitive data, virtualization for data- […]

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Pew: IoT Will Take Off By 2025, Despite Security Woes

A survey of technology experts by the Pew Research Center and Elon University predicts that the Internet of Things will take off in the next decade despite serious concerns about the security of IoT devices and the data they hold. The IoT will gain wide adoption in the next decade, with the result that many aspects of day-to-day life will be transformed by a combination of inexpensive sensors, cloud based computing and data analytics. The report cites a number of likely innovations that will become commonplace by 2025 – from “smart” food products that can report when they are exhausted or spoiled, to smart roads and infrastructure to “subcutaneous sensors or chips that provide patients’ real-time vital signs to self-trackers and medical providers.” The Pew Center canvassed more than 1600 technology leaders and analysts about the Internet of Things and published the findings of the survey on Wednesday. The survey population included […]

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Web to Wheels: Tesla Password Insecurity Exposes Cars, Drivers

We’ve interviewed security researcher Nitesh Dhanjani before. In the last year, he’s done some eye-opening investigations into consumer products like the Philips HUE smart lightbulbs. We did a podcast with Nitesh in December where we talked more generally about security and the Internet of Things. Now Dhanjani is in the news again with research on one of the most high-profile connected devices in the world: Tesla’s super-smart electric cars. In a presentation at Black Hat Asia on Friday, he  released findings of some research on the Tesla Model S that suggests the cars have a weakness common to many Web based applications: a weak authentication scheme. (A PDF version of the report is here.) Specifically: Tesla’s sophisticated cars rely on a decidedly unsophisticated security scheme: a six-character PIN. Dhanjani’s research discovered a variety of potentially exploitable holes that would give even an unsophisticated attacker a good chance at breaking into […]

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Analysis Finds Blurry Lines Between Rovio, Advertisers

Rovio, the maker of the massively popular Angry Birds, makes no secret about collecting personal data from those who download and play its games. But an analysis from the advanced threat detection firm FireEye is helping to expose the extend of data harvesting, and also to sketch out the blurry line that separates Rovio and third-party advertising networks it contracts with. In a blog post on Thursday, FireEye analysts Jimmy Suo and Tao Wei described the findings of an investigation into the interaction between Rovio’s mobile applications, including the latest version of Angry Birds, and third party ad networks such as Jumptap and Millenial Media. Using FireEye’s Mobile Threat Prevention (MTP), the two gathered and analyzed network packet capture (PCap) information and analyzed the workings of Angry Birds and its communications with third-party ad networks. The two were able to reveal a multi-stage information sharing operation, tracking code paths from the reverse-engineered […]

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Internet of Things and the Enterprise (InfoGraphic)

I’m a big fan of infographics – at least when they’re well done and present insightful facts. That’s why I’m always on the lookout for good ones – especially when the subject is The Internet of Things. So I was interested to come across the latest contribution from IoT firm Xively (part of the company LogMeIn), which pulls together some factoids on IoT’s potential in the enterprise. Among the interesting statistics gussied up in this one: an Economist Intelligence Unit data point saying that 95 % of C-level executives expect their company to be using the Internet of Things in three years time, while 74% of them predicting that it will play a ‘major role’ in their business in that time. That’s kind of astounding when you consider it: executives saying ‘Here is this new kind of technology that we barely use now. But in three years, it will be […]

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