A New Spin for Nanotechnology
Halting Hack Attacks
A New Spin for Nanotechnology
Tomorrow's nanoscale machinery could contain gears and motors based on "molecular wheels"
-- propeller-shaped molecules that rotate rapidly
in a bearinglike structure formed by surrounding molecules.
Researchers from IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory, together
with colleagues at the French National Center for Scientific
Research in Toulouse and the Risø National Laboratory
in Roskilde, Denmark, discovered the spinning molecules while
investigating specially designed molecules that can change shape
in response to a voltage pulse from a scanning tunneling microscope.
A hexa-butyl decacyclene molecule -- consisting of six legs emanating from a hub
-- apparently jumped into a tiny space left vacant by an irregularity in the surrounding
lattice. Another nearby molecule formed a bearing for the central molecule to rotate
within, which it does apparently without wear.
The scientists believe this bodes well for the development of
"nanomachines" and further demonstrates the validity of using single
molecules to perform the various functions required in such devices.
Halting Hack Attacks
A new cryptosystem can thwart even the most aggressive hacking attempts
IBM Research has contributed to a new and, for the first time, efficient public-key cryptography system that provides a
mathematically proven way to secure information from even the most aggressive hacking attempts.
Victor Shoup of IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory and Ronald Cramer of the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology have co-developed a system that thwarts so-called active attacks. These attacks bypass the difficulty
of solving the mathematical problems that are the basis of most cryptosystems. They do this by sending a series of cleverly
constructed messages to a publicly available server that has access to the secret decryption key. After analyzing the responses
to the bogus messages, a hacker can crack the code, much as a person playing "twenty questions" can guess the identity of an
object without actually asking what the object is. The new system foils such attempts by adding another level of calculations
to ensure that the server leaks no information when responding to bogus text.
Revealed in August at the Crypto '98 conference at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the cryptosystem promises
to be efficient enough for commercial use.
