Directional-hemispherical reflectance (Climatology 🌍)

Directional-hemispherical reflectance is the reflectance of a surface under direct illumination. Directional-hemispherical reflectance is the integral of the bidirectional reflectance distribution function over all viewing directions. It is sometimes called "black-sky albedo".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional-hemispherical_reflectance

#DirectionalHemisphericalReflectance #Climatology #ElectromagneticRadiation

Effects of Electromagnetic Radiation on Living Beings by Felix A. Farret, 2019

The objective of this book is to show in detail how electromagnetic waves existing in the environment can affect the electrochemical currents present in the brains and bodies of living beings that serve to communicate with their internal organs as well as with other living beings.

@bookstodon
#books
#nonfiction
#ElectromagneticRadiation

The planets can be observed not only in visible light but also in the radio range! The first attempts at radio observations of planets began in 1954 when intense radio bursts from Jupiter were detected. This radiation did not come directly from the planet but from processes in its magnetosphere.

#FunFact: Jupiter's magnetic field is massive, even relative to the size of the planet itself – it extends over 650 million kilometers (to the orbit of Saturn!) and is 4000 times stronger than Earth's magnetic field. 🚀🌍 A pulsar's magnetic field, however, can be up to 100 trillion times stronger than Jupiter's!

Radio waves penetrate deep into planet atmospheres or the surface, providing us with information that cannot be obtained through other methods. For example, phase fluctuations in the radio emissions were detected on the Moon and Mercury. On Mars, high electrical conductivity in the soil due to iron oxides was detected.

#funfact Radio astronomy amateurs assure that Jupiter can also be "received" and "heard" at home. All you need is a radio receiver for radio waves in the 18 to 22 MHz range and an antenna specifically designed for this frequency range. 📡

📷 Radiation belts of the planets, NASA, JPL, NASA/AP | Collage: A. Kazantsev.

#radioastronomy #planetaryresearch #jupiter #moon #mercury #mars #magnetosphere #atmosphere #pulsar #electromagneticradiation

Directional-hemispherical reflectance (Climatology 🌍)

Directional-hemispherical reflectance is the reflectance of a surface under direct illumination. Directional-hemispherical reflectance is the integral of the bidirectional reflectance distribution function over all viewing directions. It is sometimes called "black-sky albedo".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional-hemispherical_reflectance

#DirectionalHemisphericalReflectance #Climatology #ElectromagneticRadiation

🦊FoxiMax #228 6/8
https://foximax.com/

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🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩 #foximax #electromagneticradiation

Identifying Malware by Sniffing its EM Signature

The phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is most often attributed to Carl Sagan, specifically from his television series Cosmos. Sagan was probably not the first person to put forward such a hypothesis, and the show certainly didn't claim he was. But that's the power of TV for you; the term has since come to be known as the "Sagan Standard" and is a handy aphorism that nicely encapsulates the importance of skepticism and critical thinking when dealing with unproven theories.

It also happens to be the first phrase that came to mind when we heard about Obfuscation Revealed: Leveraging Electromagnetic Signals for Obfuscated Malware Classification, a paper presented during the 2021 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC). As described in the mainstream press, the paper detailed a method by which researchers were able to detect viruses and malware running on an Internet of Things (IoT) device simply by listening to the electromagnetic waves being emanated from it. One needed only to pass a probe over a troubled gadget, and the technique could identify what ailed it with near 100% accuracy.

Those certainly sound like extraordinary claims to us. But what about the evidence? Well, it turns out that digging a bit deeper into the story uncovered plenty of it. Not only has the paper been made available for free thanks to the sponsors of the ACSAC, but the team behind it has released all of code and documentation necessary to recreate their findings on GitHub.

Unfortunately we seem to have temporarily misplaced the $10,000 1 GHz Picoscope 6407 USB oscilloscope that their software is written to support, so we're unable to recreate the experiment in full. If you happen to come across it, please drop us a line. But in the meantime we can still walk through the process and try to separate fact from fiction in classic Sagan style.

Baking a Malware Pi

The best way of understanding what this technique is capable of, and further what it's not capable of, is to examine the team's test rig. In addition to the aforementioned Picoscope 6407, the hardware configuration includes a Langer PA-303 amplifier and a Langer RF-R H-Field probe that's been brought to rest on the BCM2837 processor of a Raspberry Pi 2B. The probe and amplifier were connected to the first channel of the oscilloscope as you might expect, but interestingly, the second channel was connected to GPIO 17 on the Pi to serve as the trigger signal.

As explained in the project's Wiki, the next step was to intentionally install various rootkits, malware, and viruses onto the Raspberry Pi. A wrapper program was then used that would first trigger the Picoscope over the GPIO pin, and then run the specific piece of software under examination for a given duration. This process was repeated until the team had amassed tens of thousands of captures for various pieces of malware including bashlite, mirai, gonnacry, keysniffer, and maK_it. This gave them data on what the electromagnetic (EM) output of the Pi's SoC looked like when its Linux operating system had become infected.

But critically, they also performed the same data acquisition on what they called a "benign" dataset. These captures were made while the Raspberry Pi was operating normally and running tools that would be common for IoT applications. EM signatures were collected for well known programs and commands such as mpg123, wget, tar, more, grep, and dmesg. This data established a baseline for normal operations, and gave the team a control to compare against.

Crunching the Numbers

As explained in section 5.3 of the paper, Data Analysis and Preprocessing , the raw EM captures need to be cleaned up before any useful data can be extracted. As you can imagine, the probe picks up a cacophony of electronic noise at such close proximity. The goal of the preprocessing stage is to filter out as much of the background noise as possible, and identify the telltale frequency fluctuations and peaks that correspond to individual programs running on the processor.

The resulting cleaned up spectrograms were then put through a neural network designed to classify the EM signatures. In much the way a computer vision system is able to classify objects in an image based on its training set, the team's software demonstrated an uncanny ability to pick out what type of software was running on the Pi when presented with a captured EM signature.

When asked to classify a signature as ransomware, rootkit, DDoS, or benign, the neural network had an accuracy of better than 98%. Similar accuracy was achieved when the system was tasked with drilling down and determining the specific type of malware that was running. This meant the system was not only capable of detecting if the Pi was compromised, but could even tell the difference between a gonnacry or bashlite infection.

Accuracy took a considerable hit when attempting to identify the specific binary being executed, but the system still manged a respectable 82.28%. Perhaps most impressively, the team claims an accuracy of 82.70% when attempting to identify between various types of malware even when attempts were made to actively obfuscate their execution, such as running them in a virtualized environment.

Realistic Expectations

While the results of the experiment are certainly compelling, it's important to stress that this all took place under controlled and ideal conditions. At no point in the paper is it claimed that this technique, at least in its current form, could actually be used in the wild to determine if a computer or IoT device has been infected with malware.

At the absolute minimum, data would need to be collected on a much wider array of computing devices before you could even say if this idea has any practical application outside of the lab. For their part, the authors say they chose the Pi 2B as a sort of "boilerplate" device; believing it's 32-bit ARM processor and vanilla Linux operating system provided a reasonable stand-in for a generic IoT gadget. That's a logical enough assumption, but there's still far too many variables at play to say that any of the EM signatures collected on the Pi test rig would be applicable to a random wireless router pulled off the shelf.

Still, it's hard not to come away impressed. While the researchers might not have created the IT equivalent of the Star Trek medical tricorder, a device that you can simply wave over the patient to instantly see what malady of the week they've been struck by, it certainly seems like they're tantalizingly close.

#computerhacks #hackadaycolumns #securityhacks #electromagneticradiation #malware #signalanalysis #spectrogram

How Much is That Shirt in the (Atmospheric) Window?

Summer is fading into a memory now, but as surely as the earth orbits the sun, those hot and sweaty days will return soon enough. And what can you do about it at the level of a single, suffering human being? After all, a person can only remove so much clothing to help cool off. Until someone figures out a way to make those stillsuits from Dune, we need an interim solution in which to drape ourselves.

We've seen the whitest paint possible for cooling buildings, and then we saw a newer, whiter and more award-winning paint a few months later. This paint works by the principle of passive cooling. Because of its color and composition, it reflects most light and absorbs some heat, which gets radiated away into the mid-infrared spectrum. It does this by slipping out Earth's atmospheric window and into space. Now, a team based in China have applied the passive cooling principle to fabric.

Wait, What's the Atmospheric Window?

Technically speaking, there are two atmospheric windows -- one in the infrared spectrum, and another in the radio spectrum. For the purposes of this discussion, we are only concerned with the infrared window. But let's back up a bit.

What gets absorbed. Image via University of Rochester's Department of Physics and Astrology

The energy radiating from the Sun includes much more than just the light we see and the heat we feel. Earth's upper atmosphere absorbs gamma rays, x-rays, and some of the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. Think of the upper atmosphere as a blanket that protects Earth from these harmful rays.

There is a hole in the blanket -- or a window, if you will -- in the low end of the infrared range (roughly 8-14 μm) that lets in visible light and heat because none of the atmospheric gasses absorb that wavelength. That's a good hole; it's a hallmark of a habitable planet. So, this is what is meant by the atmospheric window -- light and heat can go both ways. The window lets in light and heat, but more importantly, it also lets it escape. This way the planet is nice and warm, but not to a deadly degree.

Fabric of the Universe

So, back to the fabric. To reiterate, passive cooling materials work by reflecting almost all of the incoming light, keeping those energetic photons from heating the surface. These materials also absorb heat from whatever they're covering and radiate it out.

Passively cooling something like a building is kind of a set-it-and-forget-it type of thing. Clothing, on the other hand, has to be flexible, breathable, and must stand up to repeated washings. So, how does this fabric work already? Much of its reflectivity comes from titanium dioxide powder, like the stuff in some kinds of sunscreen. These titanium dioxide nanoparticles are embedded in fibers made of PLA, which emit radiation (lose heat) in the mid-infrared spectrum.

Then the fabric is further coated with polyetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), which reflects the part of the UV spectrum that the titanium dioxide doesn't. PTFE is hydrophobic, so it will repel water from the outside and sweat from the inside. The fabric is woven together rather than knit, and has a carefully-calculated pore size. In tests, the fabric reflected more than 92% of sunlight. The team half-covered a vest with their fabric and sat someone in the sunlight while wearing it. They monitored the person's body with infrared cameras and found that the side covered by the fabric measured an average of 3° C cooler than the side without the fabric.

One Shirt, Please -- With a Jolly Wrencher

This stuff seems to tick all the boxes -- it's breathable, washable, and (we assume), comfortable enough to wear all day in the desert. It's also supposed to be biodegradable, but we have to wonder what effect sweat and laundry detergents and double rubs might have on the fibers' ability to passively cool someone on a long enough timeline. Since it's mostly plastic, we do wonder how it feels.

And it comes in any color you want, as long as it's white. The good news is that it can be embroidered. Dyeing it is a no-no because it will lose its function. But if you can embroider it, you can probably make it visually interesting and still viable. A shirt made of this magic fabric will probably cost even more than that Hypercolor shirt we loved so much in the 90s, but at least it won't announce our anxiety to the world in living color. But if you need to keep cool at all costs, an atmospheric window-wear shirt might just be the ticket.

#chemistryhacks #featured #interest #originalart #atmosphericwindow #climatechange #electromagneticradiation #greenhousegases #infrared #passivecooling