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Category: security – Page 54

Is the Head, Nuclear Safety Office, overseeing the development of the DEMO Fusion Reactor (https://euro-fusion.org/programme/demo/), at EUROfusion.

DEMO (DEMOnstration Power Plant) refers to a proposed class of nuclear fusion experimental reactors that are intended to demonstrate the net production of electric power from nuclear fusion.

EUROfusion is a consortium of national fusion research institutes located in the European Union, the UK, Switzerland and Ukraine. It was established in 2014 to succeed the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) as the umbrella organization of Europe’s fusion research laboratories.

Prior to this role, Ms. Elbez-Uzan spent over a decade at the ITER Organization as Head of the Division of Nuclear Safety.

ITER (the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is being built in southern France where upon completion of construction of the main reactor and first plasma, planned for late 2028, it will be the world’s largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment and the largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor.

Prior to this role, Ms. Elbez-Uzan spent several years as Deputy Head of the Nuclear Safety Department, at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), a key player in research, development and innovation in four main areas: defense and security, low carbon energies (nuclear and renewable energies), technological research for industry, and fundamental research in the physical sciences and life sciences.

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Gene therapies have the potential to treat neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, but they face a common barrier—the blood-brain barrier. Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a way to move therapies across the brain’s protective membrane to deliver brain-wide therapy with a range of biological medications and treatments.

“There is no cure yet for many devastating disorders,” says Shaoqin “Sarah” Gong, UW-Madison professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences and biomedical engineering and researcher at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. “Innovative brain-targeted delivery strategies may change that by enabling noninvasive, safe and efficient delivery of CRISPR genome editors that could, in turn, lead to genome-editing therapies for these diseases.”

CRISPR is a molecular toolkit for editing (for example, to correct mutations that may cause disease), but the toolkit is only useful if it can get through security to the job site. The is a membrane that selectively controls access to the brain, screening out toxins and pathogens that may be present in the bloodstream. Unfortunately, the bars some beneficial treatments, like certain vaccines and gene therapy packages, from reaching their targets because in lumps them in with hostile invaders.

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Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

For years, encryption has played a core role in securing enterprise data. However, as quantum computers become more advanced, traditional encryption solutions and public-key cryptography (PKC) standards, which enterprise and consumer vendors rely on to secure their products, are at serious risk of decryption.

Today, IBM Institute for Business Value issued a new report titled Security in the Quantum Era, examining the reality of quantum risk and the need for enterprise adoption of quantum-safe capabilities to safeguard the integrity of critical applications and infrastructure as the risk of decryption increases.

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UK Atomics, a subsidiary of the company applied to the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) for a GDA by the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) and the Environment Agency (EA). This assessment aims to assess the safety, security, and environmental protection aspects of any nuclear power plant design that is intended to be deployed in the UK.

In May 2021, BEIS opened the GDA process to advanced nuclear technologies, including small modular reactors (SMRs). Successful completion of the GDA culminates in the issue of a Design Acceptance Confirmation from the ONR and a Statement of Design Acceptability from the EA. Rolls-Royce SMR was the first vendor to submit an application for a GDA of an SMR design. Its 470 MWe pressurised water reactor design was accepted for review in March 2022. In December, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy submitted a GDA entry application for its BWRX-300 SMR, and Holtec International has stated its intention to submit an application for its SMR-160 design.

UK Atomics molten salt reactor design uses unpressurised heavy water as a moderator, while the reactor is intended to burn nuclear waste while breeding new fuel from thorium. The company says, with an output of 100 MWt, it is small enough to allow for mass manufacturing and assembly line production.

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Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

2022 was a great year for generative AI, with the release of models such as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, Imagen, and Parti. And 2023 seems to follow on that path as Google introduced its latest text-to-image model, Muse, earlier this month.

Like other text-to-image models, Muse is a deep neural network that takes a text prompt as input and generates an image that fits the description. However, what sets Muse apart from its predecessors is its efficiency and accuracy. By building on the experience of previous work in the field and adding new techniques, the researchers at Google have managed to create a generative model that requires less computational resources and makes progress on some of the problems that other generative models suffer from.

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Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

Classical machine learning (ML) algorithms have proven to be powerful tools for a wide range of tasks, including image and speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP) and predictive modeling. However, classical algorithms are limited by the constraints of classical computing and can struggle to process large and complex datasets or to achieve high levels of accuracy and precision.

Enter quantum machine learning (QML).

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This flaw, which has been identified that affects the ksmbd NTLMv2 authentication in the Linux kernel, is known to quickly cause the operating system on Linux-based computers to crash. Namjae Jeon is the developer of KSMBD, which is an open-source In-kernel CIFS/SMB3 server designed for the Linux Kernel. It is an implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol in the kernel space that allows for the sharing of IPC services and files over a network.

In order to take advantage of the vulnerability, you will need to transmit corrupted packets to the server, personal computer, tablet, or smartphone that you are targeting. The attack causes what is known as “a memory overflow flaw in ksmbd decodentlmssp auth blob,” which states that nt len may be less than CIFS ENCPWD SIZE in some circumstances. Because of this, the blen parameter that is sent to ksmbd authntlmv2, which runs memcpy using blen on memory that was allocated by kmalloc(blen + CIFS CRYPTO KEY SIZE), is now negative. It is important to take note that the CIFS ENCPWD SIZE value is 16, and the CIFS CRYPTO KEY SIZE value is 8. As the heap overflow happens when blen is in the range [-8,-1], we think that the only possible outcome of this problem is a remote denial of service and not a privilege escalation or a remote code execution.

The vulnerability is caused by the way that the Linux kernel handles NTLMv2 authentication in versions 5.15-rc1 and later. The developers of the Linux kernel have not made a fix available.

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The dual-facing Ring Car Cam sits on the vehicle’s dashboard and is designed to record when your car is in motion and when it’s turned off. (Credit: Ring)

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Ring launched its first video doorbell 10 years ago — and now, its parent company Amazon is launching another security device: a camera for your car.

Josh Roth, Ring’s Chief Technology Officer, said last week that one of the products that Ring’s founder (Jamie Siminoff) has asked most about is one to protect the car.

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