Detecting explosives is a vital task both on the battlefield and off, but it requires equipment that, if sensitive enough to detect explosives traces in small quantities, is often expensive, delicate and difficult to construct. Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute have developed a method of manufacturing highly sensitive explosives detectors incorporating RF components using Ink-jet printers. This holds the promise of producing large numbers of detectors at lower cost using local resources. Read More
5 comments:
The other applications of this technology are even more thought-provoking.
Most obviously, if you can put the equivalent of an IC chip plus carbon structures on a piece of cardboard, you can essentially "print" a microphone, transmitter, and power source onto a business card. Or practically any other piece of paper- like printer paper, an envelope, or possibly even the back of a stamp. Which means you can create a nearly-indetectable bugging device.
With a bit of redesign, you could probably crank out a TEMPEST reader (this might require a manila envelope to allow for all the widgetry). Laid next to a computer, it might be able to read its hard drive as long as its turned on, making even an isolated, non-WWW connected computer vulnerable to data extraction.
(Does the Impossible Mission Force know about this?;-))
Back here in the real world, the potential for industrial espionage alone is probably giving half the "information vendors" in the world sweaty palms already. Especially because all they really need to make their own is an appropriate design program and a high-end printer system.
cheers
eon
Eon,
I suspect the big problem with printed bugs is the power supply - current batteries can't offer a useful lifetime in a thin enough design, especially if they have to be flexible.
But, even if someone does come up with a power supply (possibly some sort of energy scavenging system?), it seems to me that simply putting all incoming mail through a microwave should be enough to disable any bugs (or at least, draw attention by making the battery explode)
Still, I suspect we'll be seeing more secure data terminals being located inside Faraday Cages, just in case.
Cthel;
Microwaving the snail mail is an old trick. (Security issues dissuade me from mentioning why.)
However, it wouldn't stop the business card casually left on the desk. Or the ever-popular folder swap in the "Out" box. Not all offices are paperless, even today, and the higher the need for security, the more likely that hard copies and handwritten notes are present. (Been there, done that.)
As for a power source, carbon + a bit of selenium on the substrate = a solar cell. Which, I might add, works just fine on the photons from artificial light.
Even nastier is a passive Leyden-type static collector built of nanotubes. Going back to the hypothetical TEMPEST envelope, not only would it read the computer, the computer's own ambient static wastage (the same thing that makes your fingertip prickle when you touch the screen sometimes) might power it. And until it's powered up, it's darned near undetectable, and wicked hard to spot even when it's working, because it's a passive system.
If its designer is really smart- and a bit of a showoff- if it is detected when operating, it might just send all its data in a burst transmission- by using the local electrical wiring as the antenna array (the reverse of an "influence" tap on a phone line)- and then cleverly fry its own circuits to prevent tracing.
It all sounds very "cyberpunk", I know, but the problem with technology is that it not only keeps outracing SF, it often goes off in directions the SF writers and professional "futurists" don't see coming. "Star Trek" predicted the hand-held communicator half a century ago, but nobody predicted the actual cell phone, to cite only one example. (And even Roddenberry didn't figure on it arriving in less than fifty years, as opposed to taking over two hundred.)
Unless we can all figure out how to work in the dark in that Faraday cage, the snoopers may just have gotten a new trick in their magician's cabinet.
cheers
eon
Eon,
Ah, fair enough, I deffer to your evident knowledge on the matter.
I guess we're going to have to start designing buildings with white-noise jammers in the walls and computerised "firewalls" on the phone lines. And, just to be on the safe size, signal generators wired to the power lines and water pipes. Probably be best to get rid of the windows too, just in case the bugs start broadcasting in the IR or UV...
Looks like the office of the future will resemble a bunker...
Cthel;
Snicker.
(I don't LOL. ;-))
Actually, you just described NSA HQ. Never been there, but people I've talked to who have say that it's Electronic Paranoia Central. But as the old saying goes, even paranoids can have real enemies. To say nothing of the ELINT establishments of major nations.
As to our new offices looking like bunkers, now you know why most of our embassies overseas built in the last thirty years look like a cross between MOMA in NYC and "Fort Hoover" (FBI HQ) in DC.
If "war is the implementation of diplomacy by other means", business is oftentimes the economic equivalent of war. And half the time, international business is the handmaiden of government policy whether it wants to be or not.
Which is why business security is getting to look more and more like a cross between Gerry Anderson's "UFO" and "The Man From U.N.C.L.E."
Except minus the cute girls in short skirts and skintight catsuits. Rats.
cheers
eon
Post a Comment