Last week, a researcher outlined what he said was a “novel attack surface” in passkeys, the new authentication paradigm that offers a more secure alternative to password-based methods. In fact, the attacks demonstrated in the post are neither novel nor unique to passkeys. This distinction is important because the research has generated confusion among end users and security professionals as they assess whether this new mechanism is truly safe to use.

The attack is called Pass-ta-key—a blending of the word passkey with the phrase “pass the key” and a nod to a plate of pasta. Arie Olshtein, a researcher at security firm Palo Alto Networks, described in a post last week how Pass-ta-key could obtain all passkeys stored in the Google Password Manager app (GPM) for Windows when it’s running on a machine infected with malware.

This came as a surprise to many people because they believed passkeys are stored exclusively in the trusted platform manager (TPM), the locked-down enclave in a hardened silicon chip that’s reserved for storing cryptographic keys and other highly sensitive information on Windows machines. If passkeys are stored in the TPM, then how was Pass-ta-key able to extract the entire set of passkeys stored by the app, they wanted to know.

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Some 1.3 billion years ago, when multicellular organisms were just emerging on Earth and life was still confined to the ocean, two behemoth black holes smashed together in a far-flung galaxy. The collision was so powerful that it jolted the universe, creating a ripple in the fabric of space-time that traveled across the cosmos atContinue reading "How gravitational waves transformed our universe"

The post How gravitational waves transformed our universe appeared first on Astronomy Magazine.

Jason Semprini was excited about his research on policies mandating that elementary school students receive the human papillomavirus vaccine. HPV causes most cases of cervical cancer, but counterintuitively, Semprini found that mandates don’t do that much to reduce the overall rate of cervical cancer in a population. That’s odd, but it's also not completely surprising—we know that mandating a vaccine can motivate some people to find ways to avoid it.

Semprini wrote up the study and submitted the manuscript to a journal, where it was sent out for peer review, a long-standing process through which other researchers in the field assess the validity of research and make a recommendation on whether or not it should be published. This is usually done anonymously and on a volunteer basis.

In this case, the reviewer did not share Semprini’s excitement. That may have stemmed from a misunderstanding of the study’s central message: The reviewer mistakenly thought Semprini was questioning whether the HPV vaccine itself prevents cervical cancer rather than studying the effectiveness of a policy meant to increase vaccination rates. “There’s a very big difference there,” said Semprini, who is a health economist at Des Moines University.

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Jason Semprini was excited about his research on policies mandating that elementary school students receive the human papillomavirus vaccine. HPV causes most cases of cervical cancer, but counterintuitively, Semprini found that mandates don’t do that much to reduce the overall rate of cervical cancer in a population. That’s odd, but it's also not completely surprising—we know that mandating a vaccine can motivate some people to find ways to avoid it.

Semprini wrote up the study and submitted the manuscript to a journal, where it was sent out for peer review, a long-standing process through which other researchers in the field assess the validity of research and make a recommendation on whether or not it should be published. This is usually done anonymously and on a volunteer basis.

In this case, the reviewer did not share Semprini’s excitement. That may have stemmed from a misunderstanding of the study’s central message: The reviewer mistakenly thought Semprini was questioning whether the HPV vaccine itself prevents cervical cancer rather than studying the effectiveness of a policy meant to increase vaccination rates. “There’s a very big difference there,” said Semprini, who is a health economist at Des Moines University.

Read full article

Comments