Global Quality Journal

Battery Killer Bugs Detected

Purdue University News Service:

'No-sleep energy bugs' drain smartphone batteries

June 13, 2012

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers have proposed a method to automatically detect a new class of software glitches in smartphones called "no-sleep energy bugs," which can entirely drain batteries while the phones are not in use.

"These energy bugs are a silent battery killer," said Y. Charlie Hu, a Purdue University professor of electrical and computer engineering. "A fully charged phone battery can be drained in as little as five hours."

Because conserving battery power is critical for smartphones, the industry has adopted "an aggressive sleep policy," he said.

"What this means is that smartphones are always in a sleep mode, by default. When there are no active user interactions such as screen touches, every component, including the central processor, stays off unless an app instructs the operating system to keep it on."

 Various background operations need to be performed while the phone is idle.

"For example, a mailer may need to automatically update email by checking with the remote server," Hu said.

To prevent the phone from going to sleep during such operations, smartphone manufacturers make application programming interfaces, or APIs, available to app developers. The developers insert the APIs into apps to instruct the phone to stay awake long enough to perform necessary operations.

"App developers have to explicitly juggle different power control APIs that are exported from the operating systems of the smartphones," Hu said. "Unfortunately, programmers are only human. They make mistakes when using these APIs, which leads to software bugs that mishandle power control, preventing the phone from engaging the sleep mode. As a result, the phone stays awake and drains the battery." [Read more]

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iTunes More Robust Than Industrial Infrastructure Software

arstechnica:

Defects leave critical military, industrial infrastructure open to hacks

iTunes has "more robust" security than some of our critical infrastructure.

by Dan Goodin - July 13 2012, 12:43pm EDT

An architectural diagram touting a security feature of Tridium's Niagara Framework

tridium.com

Security researchers have blown the whistle on serious vulnerabilities in an Internet-connected system used by the US military, hospitals, and private industry to control boilers, air-conditioners, security alarms, and other critical industrial equipment.

The defects in the Niagara Framework, which links more than 11 million devices in 52 countries, could allow malicious hackers to seize control of critical infrastructure, an article published by The Washington Post warned. The vulnerabilities were unearthed by Billy Rios and Terry McCorkle, two researchers who have spent the past 18 months exposing security holes in a variety of ICS, or industrial control systems.

"The ICS software community is light years behind modern software security," Rios wrote in a blog post recounting his odyssey in getting Niagara officials to publicly acknowledge the vulnerabilities after he and McCorkle reported them. "Sadly, we can honestly say that the security of iTunes is more robust than most ICS software." [Read more]

posted by: gqjournal