security

 Face Recognition System

$30 Face Recognition System

Cornell undergraduates Brian Harding and Cat Jubinski built a portable face recognition system for their capstone ECE 4760 project: “Our design consists of an Atmel ATmega644 8-bit microcontroller, a C3088 camera module with an OmniVision OV6620 CMOS image sensor, Atmel’s AT45DB321D Serial Dataflash, a Varitronix MDLS16264 LCD module for output, a 9-volt battery, and a small wooden structure for chin support.” The system is hooked up to a computer to train the pattern-recognition algorithm, but from then on it can enroll new users, delete old users, and recognize up to 20 enrolled users as a standalone system.

VOIP ideal for hiding secret messages?

VOIP ideal for hiding secret messages?

The 50-cent word here is “steganography,” which per Wikipedia is “the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message.” You may have heard, for instance, that you can encode a hidden message in, say, an image file, in such a way that no one who wasn’t looking for it would know that it’s there.

Well, this morning Danger Room linked to a post at IEEE Spectrum to the effect that Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is particularly susceptible to steganographic hijinks. Wired’s David Pierce put it this way: