Schneier on Security

vas pup • April 7, 2021 4:05 PM

Czech researchers develop revolutionary nuclear heating plant
https://www.dw.com/en/czech-researchers-develop-revolutionary-nuclear-heating-plant/a-57072924

“A team of scientists has come up with a
==>radical solution to heat cities using spent nuclear rods, which they say is cost-effective and greener than natural gas. As the EU moves away from coal, many are interested.

Researchers at the Czech Technical University in Prague and the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen have come up with an innovative solution: the Teplator, a system which uses the radioactive decay heat produced by spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors to heat water. The team, led by Radek Skoda, has already been granted a patent for the concept and design of what it says is a very cost-effective alternative to coal and gas-powered plants.

Skoda, of the Czech Technical University, told DW that the project was particularly noteworthy because it allows power stations to generate heat from spent fuel elements that otherwise would have to be stored and cooled at great expense for many years.

Skoda explained that the Teplator was similar in size to “mini” nuclear research reactors already operating in major European cities such as Vienna, Prague and Munich but much simpler in terms of technology and design because it “only” generated heat.
===> “The main problem with these small nuclear reactors is that they generate electricity, just like the larger nuclear power plants, and this is very expensive,” he said.

The simplest version of the Teplator has been designed to operate at normal atmospheric pressure and at a temperature of 100 degrees Celsius (212 Fahrenheit), requiring fewer complicated technical solutions and materials.”

My nickel: how many spent nuclear rods do we have in US to utilize or at least do research on this idea utilization?

vas pup • April 8, 2021 4:59 PM

Facial recognition ID with a twist: Smiles, winks and other facial movements for access
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210318085552.htm

“Like every other human biometric identification system before it (fingerprints, retina scans) there are still significant security flaws in some of the most advanced identity verification technology. Brigham Young University electrical and computer engineering professor D.J. Lee has decided there is a better and more secure way to use your face for restricted access.

==>It’s called Concurrent Two-Factor Identity Verification (C2FIV) and it requires !!!!both one’s facial identity and a specific facial motion to gain access. To set it up, a user faces a camera and records a short 1-2 second video of either a unique facial motion or a lip movement from reading a secret phrase. The video is then input into the device, which extracts facial features and the features of the facial motion, storing them for later ID verification.

====>”The biggest problem we are trying to solve is to make sure the identity verification process is intentional,” said Lee, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at BYU.
!!!!”If someone is unconscious, you can still use their finger to unlock a phone and get access to their device or you can scan their retina. You see this a lot in the movies — think of Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible even using masks to replicate someone else’s face.”

To get technical, C2FIV relies on an integrated neural network framework to ===>learn facial features and actions concurrently. This framework models dynamic, sequential data like facial motions, where all the frames in a recording have to be considered (unlike a static photo with a figure that can be outlined).

Using this integrated neural network framework, the user’s facial features and movements are embedded and stored on a server or in an embedded device and when they later attempt to gain access, the computer compares the newly generated embedding to the stored one. That user’s ID is verified if the new and stored embeddings match at a certain threshold.

“We’re pretty excited with the technology because it’s pretty unique to add another level of protection that doesn’t cause more trouble for the user,” Lee said.

In their preliminary study, Lee and his Ph.D. student Zheng Sun recorded 8,000 video clips from 50 subjects making facial movements such as blinking, dropping their jaw, smiling or raising their eyebrows as well as many random facial motions to train the neural network. They then created a dataset of positive and negative pairs of facial motions and inputted higher scores for the positive pairs (those that matched). Currently, with the small dataset, ==>the trained neural network verifies identities with over 90% accuracy. They are confident the accuracy can be much higher with a larger dataset and improvements on the network.

Lee, who has filed a patent on the tech already, said the idea is not to compete with Apple or have the application be all about smartphone access. In his opinion, C2FIV has broader application, including accessing restricted areas at a workplace, online banking, ATM use, safe deposit box access or even hotel room entry or keyless entry/access to your vehicle.

“We could build this very tiny device with a camera on it and this device could be deployed easily at so many different locations,” Lee said. “How great would it be to know that even if you lost your car key, no one can steal your vehicle because they don’t know your secret facial action?”