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Researchers Develop System To Send Passwords, Keys Through Users' Bodies (onthewire.io)
Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: Credential theft is one of the more persistent and troubling threats in security, and researchers have been trying to come up with answers to it for decades. A team at the University of Washington has developed a system that can prevent attackers from intercepting passwords and keys sent over the air by sending them through users' bodies instead. The human body is a good transmission mechanism for certain kinds of waves, and the UW researchers were looking for a way to take advantage of that fact to communicate authentication information from a user's phone directly to a target device, such as a door knob or medical device. In order to make that idea a reality, they needed to develop a system that could be in direct contact with the user's body, and could produce electromagnetic signals below 10 MHz. And to make the system usable for a mass audience, the team needed widely available hardware that could generate and transmit the signals. So the researchers settled on the fingerprint sensor on iPhones and the touchpad on Lenovo laptops, as well as a fingerprint scanner and a touchpad from Adafruit. The concept is deceptively simple: generate an electromagnetic signal from the fingerprint sensor or touchpad and transmit that through the user's body to the target device. The signal can carry a typical password or even an encryption key, the researchers said. "We show for the first time that commodity devices can be used to generate wireless data transmissions that are confined to the human body. Specifically, we show that commodity input devices such as fingerprint sensors and touchpads can be used to transmit information to only wireless receivers that are in contact with the body," the researchers, Mehrdad Hessar, Vikram Iyer, and Shyamnath Gollakota, of UW said in their paper, "Enabling On-Body Transmissions With Commodity Devices."
Does anyone know more info about it?
Yes, I do recall having read something somewhere about it being total bullshit.
But wait, there's this new study I heard about...
If there does turn out to be a small link, I'll be shocked if the risk is going to be too minuscule to obsess over. People only care about cell phones causing cancer because invisible EM / radio waves are freaky. It's weird magical stuff flying through the air that I can't see or hear or smell --> We need to be paranoid about it. That is the basis of the concern over non-ionizing EM causing cancer. Here are a list of things that we're almost certain cause cancer:
* Barbecued food with any black "grill marks" or other carbonization on it.
* Smoked foods
* Regularly being around lit candles
* Being around a lit fireplace, even if it's just occasionally.
* Drinking your coffee (or any other drink/food) while it's too hot.
* The sun--anything over the minimum amount required for your body to manufacture the vitamin D you need (just a few minutes per day, at least for lower-melanin people in lower latitudes).
* Possibly anything that causes prolonged or repeated inflammation.
I'm not saying you shouldn't worry about your kids or err on the side of caution, but if you aren't at all concerned about everything on the above list... don't kid yourself. You're not a safe, informed conscientious parent. You're simply unduly afraid of what you don't understand.