Author Archives: richard wilson

Low cost biometric device to replace passwords

JarWhiteNoReflectionLog-on password replacement is one of the Holy Grails of the IT security world. Now a German start-up has come up with a personal biometric crypto-key which it says is practical and adds little cost.

Called Jar, it is a true biometric device which uses the user’s finger tip as their password for every login and registration.

The Aachen-based company, which is project of venture firm MBP-Investments, is developing the Arduino-based system to run an asymmetrical encryption method which adds a high level of security to the system.

“This is the first biometric crypto-key for end customers. Instead of using passwords to access websites, the user can login or register with the touch of his or her finger,” said developer, Jannis Mertens.

The first device will connect to the PC or mobile through the audio input and is protected using encryption.

“We have no access to the data which is encrypted on JAR, so we have no way of decrypting your passwords,” said Jannis Mertens.

Because each message is encrypted separately, there’s no way to derive one message from the previous message; each encrypted message broadcasted is non-deterministic and pseudorandom.

“Devices will only unlock for the most recent message, so a hacker is unable to unlock your devices by re-broadcasting an old message,” said the developer, said Jannis Mertens.

jar1Only devices that have been set up with the device will have the ability to interact with it. A device still has to verify its legitimacy through an automatic encrypted handshake in order to interact with the device.

The developers have started a campaign on Kickstarter to raise €100,000 needed to fund the next stage of development and they hope to be ready for revenue generation as of early 2016, after starting the mass production of the hardware.

The customer target price is €99.

A future plan is to replace the audio-connector interface with a Bluetooth 4.0 LE interface to connect to the host device.

Richard Wilson

Low cost biometric device to replace passwords

JarWhiteNoReflectionLog-on password replacement is one of the Holy Grails of the IT security world. Now a German start-up has come up with a personal biometric crypto-key which it says is practical and adds little cost.

Called Jar, it is a true biometric device which uses the user’s finger tip as their password for every login and registration.

The Aachen-based company, which is project of venture firm MBP-Investments, is developing the Arduino-based system to run an asymmetrical encryption method which adds a high level of security to the system.

“This is the first biometric crypto-key for end customers. Instead of using passwords to access websites, the user can login or register with the touch of his or her finger,” said developer, Jannis Mertens.

The first device will connect to the PC or mobile through the audio input and is protected using encryption.

“We have no access to the data which is encrypted on JAR, so we have no way of decrypting your passwords,” said Jannis Mertens.

Because each message is encrypted separately, there’s no way to derive one message from the previous message; each encrypted message broadcasted is non-deterministic and pseudorandom.

“Devices will only unlock for the most recent message, so a hacker is unable to unlock your devices by re-broadcasting an old message,” said the developer, said Jannis Mertens.

jar1Only devices that have been set up with the device will have the ability to interact with it. A device still has to verify its legitimacy through an automatic encrypted handshake in order to interact with the device.

The developers have started a campaign on Kickstarter to raise €100,000 needed to fund the next stage of development and they hope to be ready for revenue generation as of early 2016, after starting the mass production of the hardware.

The customer target price is €99.

A future plan is to replace the audio-connector interface with a Bluetooth 4.0 LE interface to connect to the host device.

Richard Wilson

Low cost biometric device to replace passwords

JarWhiteNoReflectionLog-on password replacement is one of the Holy Grails of the IT security world. Now a German start-up has come up with a personal biometric crypto-key which it says is practical and adds little cost.

Called Jar, it is a true biometric device which uses the user’s finger tip as their password for every login and registration.

The Aachen-based company, which is project of venture firm MBP-Investments, is developing the Arduino-based system to run an asymmetrical encryption method which adds a high level of security to the system.

“This is the first biometric crypto-key for end customers. Instead of using passwords to access websites, the user can login or register with the touch of his or her finger,” said developer, Jannis Mertens.

The first device will connect to the PC or mobile through the audio input and is protected using encryption.

“We have no access to the data which is encrypted on JAR, so we have no way of decrypting your passwords,” said Jannis Mertens.

Because each message is encrypted separately, there’s no way to derive one message from the previous message; each encrypted message broadcasted is non-deterministic and pseudorandom.

“Devices will only unlock for the most recent message, so a hacker is unable to unlock your devices by re-broadcasting an old message,” said the developer, said Jannis Mertens.

jar1Only devices that have been set up with the device will have the ability to interact with it. A device still has to verify its legitimacy through an automatic encrypted handshake in order to interact with the device.

The developers have started a campaign on Kickstarter to raise €100,000 needed to fund the next stage of development and they hope to be ready for revenue generation as of early 2016, after starting the mass production of the hardware.

The customer target price is €99.

A future plan is to replace the audio-connector interface with a Bluetooth 4.0 LE interface to connect to the host device.

Richard Wilson

Mobile data surge dominates IT market, says Gartner

Jessica Ekholm

Jessica Ekholm

The global market for IT products and services in dollar terms is  predicted to shrink by 5.5% this year, according to the latest forecast on IT spending by Gartner.

Prospects for the global IT market have worsened in the last three months, but this is largely due to strengthening value of the dollar, says Gartner.

In constant-currency terms, the IT market is still predicted to grow by 2.5% in 2015, although this growth figure has been trimmed back in the last three months.

Gartner is also predicting huge surge in mobile data traffic, which it estimates will reach 52 million terabytes in 2015. This is an increase of 59% on last year, according to Gartner.

This rate of growth does not look like weakening and mobile data levels are estimated to reach 173 million terabytes by 2018.

Jessica Ekholm, research director, writes on the Gartner website:

“Mobile data traffic is soaring worldwide, more than tripling by 2018. New, fast mobile data connections (3G and 4G) will grow more slowly, from 3.8 billion in 2015 to 5.1 billion in 2018, as users switch from slower 2G connections and consume more mobile data.”

In the third quarter of 2014, Gartner conducted a mobile app survey and asked 1,000 smartphone users in the US and 1,000 in Germany about their mobile app usage habits.

“Germany and the US provide two distinct mature markets from which we can make good comparisons about CSP strategies and their impact on broader consumer behaviour,” writes Ekholm.

“The survey showed that German users are more restricted by their data plans, and are therefore less likely to watch videos or consume large amounts of data via cellular networks compared to the US This means less revenue per user for service providers in Germany.”

Source: Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast

Richard Wilson

Mobile data surge dominates IT market, says Gartner

Jessica Ekholm - Gartner

Jessica Ekholm – Gartner

The global market for IT products and services in dollar terms is  predicted to shrink by 5.5% this year, according to the latest forecast on IT spending by Gartner.

Prospects for the global IT market have worsened in the last three months, but this is largely due to strengthening value of the dollar, says Gartner.

In constant-currency terms, the IT market is still predicted to grow by 2.5% in 2015, although this growth figure has been trimmed back in the last three months.

Gartner is also predicting huge surge in mobile data traffic, which it estimates will reach 52 million terabytes in 2015. This is an increase of 59% on last year, according to Gartner.

This rate of growth does not look like weakening and mobile data levels are estimated to reach 173 million terabytes by 2018.

Jessica Ekholm, research director, writes on the Gartner website:

“Mobile data traffic is soaring worldwide, more than tripling by 2018. New, fast mobile data connections (3G and 4G) will grow more slowly, from 3.8 billion in 2015 to 5.1 billion in 2018, as users switch from slower 2G connections and consume more mobile data.”

In the third quarter of 2014, Gartner conducted a mobile app survey and asked 1,000 smartphone users in the US and 1,000 in Germany about their mobile app usage habits.

“Germany and the US provide two distinct mature markets from which we can make good comparisons about CSP strategies and their impact on broader consumer behaviour,” writes Ekholm.

“The survey showed that German users are more restricted by their data plans, and are therefore less likely to watch videos or consume large amounts of data via cellular networks compared to the US This means less revenue per user for service providers in Germany.”

Source: Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast

Richard Wilson

Mobile data surge dominates IT market, says Gartner

Jessica Ekholm

Jessica Ekholm

The global market for IT products and services in dollar terms is  predicted to shrink by 5.5% this year, according to the latest forecast on IT spending by Gartner.

Prospects for the global IT market have worsened in the last three months, but this is largely due to strengthening value of the dollar, says Gartner.

In constant-currency terms, the IT market is still predicted to grow by 2.5% in 2015, although this growth figure has been trimmed back in the last three months.

Gartner is also predicting huge surge in mobile data traffic, which it estimates will reach 52 million terabytes in 2015. This is an increase of 59% on last year, according to Gartner.

This rate of growth does not look like weakening and mobile data levels are estimated to reach 173 million terabytes by 2018.

Jessica Ekholm, research director, writes on the Gartner website:

“Mobile data traffic is soaring worldwide, more than tripling by 2018. New, fast mobile data connections (3G and 4G) will grow more slowly, from 3.8 billion in 2015 to 5.1 billion in 2018, as users switch from slower 2G connections and consume more mobile data.”

In the third quarter of 2014, Gartner conducted a mobile app survey and asked 1,000 smartphone users in the US and 1,000 in Germany about their mobile app usage habits.

“Germany and the US provide two distinct mature markets from which we can make good comparisons about CSP strategies and their impact on broader consumer behaviour,” writes Ekholm.

“The survey showed that German users are more restricted by their data plans, and are therefore less likely to watch videos or consume large amounts of data via cellular networks compared to the US This means less revenue per user for service providers in Germany.”

Source: Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast

Richard Wilson

Zynq UltraScale+ gets Micrium RTOS for all processors

1423770108534Xilinx’s All Programmable Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC has been supported by a commercial real-time operating system (RTOS) from Micrium.

The Zynq UltraScale+’s quad-core ARM Cortex A53 and dual-core Cortex R5 CPUs will run the Micrium µC/OS-II, µC/OS-III kernels and full suite of RTOS components, the company says.

They will also run on the Xilinx MicroBlaze FPGA-based soft processor core which can be part of a Zynq design.

Satish Swarnkar, senior director of software product management at Xilinx writes:

“The Zynq Ultrascale+ has an ARM processor and supports FPGA-based MicroBlaze soft processors. Micrium is highly scalable RTOS that can be used in the ARM and our MicroBlaze processors, simplifying application design by giving end users the capability to use a single operating system.”

The Xilinx SDK support includes µC/OS-II and µC/OS-III and components, including µC/TCP-IP, µC/USB, µC/FS, (among others), for the Zynq Ultrascale+ which can be downloaded from the Micrium website.

Along with the Cortex-A53  and Cortex-R5 CPUs, Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC has an ARM Mali-400 graphics processor.

 

Richard Wilson

Zynq UltraScale+ gets Micrium RTOS for all processors

1423770108534Xilinx’s All Programmable Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC has been supported by a commercial real-time operating system (RTOS) from Micrium.

The Zynq UltraScale+’s quad-core ARM Cortex A53 and dual-core Cortex R5 CPUs will run the Micrium µC/OS-II, µC/OS-III kernels and full suite of RTOS components, the company says.

They will also run on the Xilinx MicroBlaze FPGA-based soft processor core which can be part of a Zynq design.

Satish Swarnkar, senior director of software product management at Xilinx writes:

“The Zynq Ultrascale+ has an ARM processor and supports FPGA-based MicroBlaze soft processors. Micrium is highly scalable RTOS that can be used in the ARM and our MicroBlaze processors, simplifying application design by giving end users the capability to use a single operating system.”

The Xilinx SDK support includes µC/OS-II and µC/OS-III and components, including µC/TCP-IP, µC/USB, µC/FS, (among others), for the Zynq Ultrascale+ which can be downloaded from the Micrium website.

Along with the Cortex-A53  and Cortex-R5 CPUs, Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC has an ARM Mali-400 graphics processor.

 

Richard Wilson

Arduino-compatible IoT platform comes with apps and cloud service

1x-XBee-S1-300x300An Arduino-compatible coding platform has been designed by Digi International for building M2M wireless sensors and other IoT networks.

Available exclusively through Digi-Key for $99, the XBee platform comes with an API to design M2M wireless communications, in the 2.4GHz unlicensed frequency band, into control systems and sensor networks.

The coding platform features an Arduino-compatible microprocessor, three XBee modules, LEDs, adapters, cables, and other components in addition to software code examples.

Five design projects use the Processing open source programming language for development.

The distributor has set-up a separate support website for XBee.

 “The XBee brand by Digi International is well known in wireless circles for delivering innovation at an appealing price point,” said David Stein, vice-president of global semiconductors at Digi-Key.

XBee wireless networking applications can also make use of a device cloud service provided by Digi for secure management of multiple devices.

Richard Wilson

NIWeek: PXI brings fast parallel test to 4G

wts_05_bdrNI is aiming to make wireless manufacturing test more cost-effective as system move to volume production.

The key is to run test in parallel to improve throughput.

To do this the company has introduced at NIWeek in Austin, Texas today, a multi-standard, multi- DUT and multi-port test system based on the PXI modular instrument platform.

The Wireless Test System (WTS) uses software-designed PXI vector signal transceiver hardware running LabVIEW and TestStand sequencing software.

The scalable RF test platform supports a range of wireless standards including LTE Advanced, 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy.

It can be used to test multi-standard 3G and 4G hardware which now also incorporates additional short-range wireless connectivity and navigation standards.

Richard Wilson