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Securing next-gen drones

John Edwards of Semiconductor Engineering recently penned an article that explores the security risks associated with drones. The biggest drone threat of all, says Edwards, may turn out to be attacks made against the vehicles themselves.

“Drones, also known as UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and UASs (unmanned aerial systems), need a variety of internal components to work effectively. The list includes MEMS (such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers and pressure sensors), GPS modules, processors and digital radios,” he explained.

Going cardless for CAS with a hardware root-of-trust

The majority of set-top boxes (STBs) on the market in the 1990s were secured by Conditional Access System (CAS) smart cards that stored STB identities along with their respective service rights. While these early smart cards offered operators basic levels of content protection against unauthorized viewers, they were ultimately incapable of guarding against increasingly sophisticated methods of attack by criminal hackers and pirate collectives.

Why tokenization is critical for mobile payments

Steven Anderson of PaymentWeek recently observed that tokenization is a critical aspect of the mobile payments revolution.

Essentially, tokenization protects payment credentials by replacing them with a randomly generated number that resembles the customer’s primary account number (PAN). The unique identifier, known as a ‘payment token’ or ‘tokenized PAN’, is worthless if stolen, as it acts as a reference for a consumer’s original card data which only the card networks and the consumer’s bank can map back to the original account.

Accelerating high performance computing systems

Esthela Gallardo and Patricia J. Teller recently penned an article for HPC Wire that explores the various challenges associated with cross-accelerator performance profiling. As Gallardo and Teller note, high performance computing (HPC) systems are comprised of multiple compute nodes interconnected by a network.

“Previously these nodes were composed solely of multi-core processors, but nowadays they also include many-core processors, which are called accelerators,” the authors explained.

Exploring future memory requirements for quantum computing

Quantum computing utilizes quantum-mechanical phenomena, including superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. According to Wikipedia, quantum computers differ from traditional binary digital electronic systems based on transistors. To be sure, digital computing encodes data into binary digits (bits), each of which is always in one or two definite states: 0 or 1. In contrast, quantum computation exploits quantum bits, which can be in superpositions of states.

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