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RFID Could Be The Next Breakthrough Technology In Protecting Against Digital Piracy
Researchers from the Wireless Internet for the Mobile Enterprise Consortium (WINMEC) at UCLA are working on a new radio frequency identification application that in the not-too-distant future could allow consumers the luxury of watching the latest theater blockbuster at home – while also blocking the ability of would-be wrong doers to pirate the lucrative digital content.
Led by UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science professor Rajit
Gadh, the group is exploring the use of radio frequency identification technology, known as RFID, as a tool for digital rights management in an effort to protect DVD content against unauthorized use.
RFID technology allows data to be transmitted by a product containing an RFID tag microchip, which is read by an RFID reader. No contact or even line-of-sight is needed to read data from a product that contains an RFID tag. The transmitted data can provide identification or location information about the product, or specifics such as date of purchase and price.
The UCLA research group is developing the software and hardware components of a system that would embed DVDs with an RFID tag and insert an RFID reader in DVD players. Tagged DVDs would theoretically then play only in RFID-enabled players that can authenticate the DVD's tag. Viewers without an RFID-enabled player won’t be able to view the content because the tag essentially locks the disc – meaning copyright owners such as film production companies would have secure digital rights management over the work.
"We're in the very early stages of this project, the first research stage. We have the different pieces of the technology and a pretty good idea of how it’s going to fit together. But right now we’re examining whether this technology is really feasible,” says Gadh. We should begin to publish research reports on the project during the next few months or so."
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Innovative Encryption System to Enable More Secure Communication
Someday, doctors may use your fingerprints to lock your medical records or computer technicians to secure transactions between servers, ensuring that you’re the only person able to view encrypted data. UCLA computer science faculty members Rafail
Ostrovsky and Amit Sahai are working on the research that may make this vision a reality.
“In any secure system, designers must take into account two issues – users are unlikely to remember long passwords and will use short ones, and they are nearly always logging in from a remote location over the network, which opens the system to person in the middle attacks,” explains Ostrovsky.
In 2001, Ostrovsky and his team devised a method to secure password systems against person in the middle (or PIM) attacks, and are now extending its capabilities to accept fingerprints as passwords. They have demonstrated a system in which data is transmitted back and forth and protected from PIM attacks through biometrics – the science of authentication through use of physiological features such as fingerprints or retinas.
The use of biometrics for security presents an additional challenge in that no two scans are ever exactly alike. A person might place his or her finger slightly to one side on the pad or blink during a retina scan. Despite these slight variations that occur each time the biometretic data is obtained, the UCLA researchers have shown how biometrics can still be used to protect privacy in a secure system.
“But even if biometric data is not kept secret,” Sahai points out, “it can still have important security applications.”
Working with Brent Waters (BS ’00), currently a postdoc at Stanford, Sahai has shown how to use biometric data as public keys to unlock encrypted information, replacing the numerical keys currently in use. Because biometrics are unique to individuals, one can have confidence that a public key really does belong to a particular human user, eliminating the need for a cumbersome public key infrastructure. Sahai’s solution relies on an attribute-based system, in which identities are viewed as a set of specific characteristics.
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Institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration at UCLA Awarded $2 Million Grant from the NIH
The Institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration (CMISE) at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has been awarded a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop an automated, chip-based metabolic analysis tool.
Metabolics – the study of the way in which the cellular metabolism works –seeks to use biological cells, intracellular components and molecular machines to build a self-regulating system for sensing and controlling specific environmental threats. Recent studies show that many degenerative health issues –including diabetes, digestive and kidney diseases, as well as cancer –actually damage the cell’s metabolic pathways.
UCLA chemical engineering professor James
Liao, with a team of researchers, will use the NIH Roadmap grant to develop a practical tool to aid in more easily extracting and measuring the metabolites, the substance produced by the metabolism, in cells. Though current technologies are available, these prove impractical on a large scale due to the high cost and the time-intensive manual labor required. Much of the complex equipment needed to process metabolites also is not widely available.
The goal of Liao’s work is to find a general technical platform that will enable health professionals to study the metabolic pathways of cells in a shorter amount of time, in a more efficient manner and without a lot of complex machinery.
If Liao and his team are successful, health professionals will be able to extract
metabolites from cells on what is basically a lab-on-a-chip platform, which will
actually auto-mix tiny amounts of chemical solutions to prepare the relevant
metabolites of the cells for extraction. The practical outcome means a lower
cost, less time spent waiting for results, a more efficient process and higher
accuracy in results for the patient and doctor alike.
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New Institute for Digital Research and Education Focusing on Large-scale Simulations
UCLA has announced the formation of the Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE), a high-end computation, system simulation, and visualization center that will bring together faculty expertise from across the campus.
The Institute will focus on delivery of large scale simulations of all kinds to a wide spectrum of faculty involved in cutting-edge research. For example, simulations can allow a researcher to estimate how the impact of pollution or chemicals on one area of the environment impacts other variables including the earth’s climate, helping researchers to find proactive solutions for potential problems before they occur.
The campus has a considerable number of investigators who are deeply involved in digital and computational research and are working in the realms of engineering, science, the arts and humanities, and applied mathematics. The Institute intends to capitalize on UCLA’s considerable strengths in such areas as plasma science and engineering, brain mapping, computational chemistry, fluid dynamics, and climate modeling to obtain base funding that will link these researchers in innovative and dynamic ways.
The Institute will be directed by professor Alan
J. Laub, who comes from the
University of California, Davis, and has had a long and distinguished career
in control theory, numerical linear algebra and advanced computing. At UCLA,
he will hold appointments in both electrical engineering and mathematics.
Laub also currently serves on the Simulation-Based Engineering Sciences panel for the National Science Foundation, a panel that seeks to accelerate the use of computers in engineering research and education.
He notes, “The new institute is going to put UCLA on the international map in digital and computational research, and there are no limits to what we can do to make UCLA an even bigger contributor to the field of digital computation and education. Modern computation is all about team-based enterprises, and teams involve many players across many disciplines. I intend IDRE to be a unifying force on this campus.”
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