Florida Institute for Conservation Science

Bluetooth is overwhelmingly the protocol of choice for personal area networking, and the Bluetooth Classic standard has been in continuous use for over 20 years. Bluetooth devices make themselves Discoverable to communicate, but best practice to protect privacy is to ensure that devices remain in Non-Discoverable mode. This paper demonstrates the futility of protecting devices by making them Non-Discoverable. We introduce the Blue’s Clues attack, which presents the first direct, non-disruptive approach to fully extracting the permanent, unique Bluetooth MAC identifier from targeted devices in Non-Discoverable mode. We also demonstrate that we can fully characterize device capabilities and retrieve identifiers, some of which we discover often contain identifying information about the device owner. We demonstrate Blue’s Clues using a software-defined radio and mounting the attack over the air against both our own devices and, with institutional approval, throughout a public building. We find that a wide variety of Bluetooth devices can be uniquely identified in less than 10 seconds on average, with affected devices ranging from smartphones and headphones to gas pump skimmers and nanny-cams, spanning all versions of the Bluetooth Classic standard. While we provide potential mitigation against attacks, Blue’s Clues forces a reassessment of over 20 years of best practices for protecting devices against discovery.

Logic locking has been proposed as an obfuscation technique to protect outsourced IC designs from IP piracy by untrusted entities in the design and fabrication process. In this case, the netlist is locked by adding extra key-gates, and will be unlocked only if a correct key is applied to the key-gates. The key is assumed to be written into a non-volatile memory after the fabrication by the IP owner. In the past several years, the focus of the research community has been mostly on Oracle-guided attacks, such as SAT attacks, on logic locking and proposing proper countermeasures against such attacks. However, none of the reported research in the literature has ever challenged a more fundamental assumption of logic locking, which is the security of the key itself. In other words, if an adversary can read out the correct key after insertion, the security of the entire scheme is broken. In this work, we first review possible adversaries for the locked circuits and their capabilities. Afterward, we demonstrate that even with the assumption of having a tamper- and read-proof memory for the key storage, which is not vulnerable to any physical attacks, the key transfer between the memory and the key-gates through registers and buffers make the key extraction by an adversary possible. To support our claim, we implemented a proof-of-concept locked circuit as well as one of the standard logic locking benchmarks on an FPGA manufactured with a 28 nm technology and extract obfuscation keys using optical probing. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of the proposed attack in different scenarios and propose potential countermeasures.

The Global Deal for Nature (GDN) is a time-bound, science-driven plan to save the diversity and abundance of life on Earth. Pairing the GDN and the Paris Climate Agreement would avoid catastrophic climate change, conserve species, and secure essential ecosystem services. New findings give urgency to this union: Less than half of the terrestrial realm is intact, yet conserving all native ecosystems-coupled with energy transition measures-will be required to remain below a 1.5°C rise in average global temperature. The GDN targets 30% of Earth to be formally protected and an additional 20% designated as climate stabilization areas, by 2030, to stay below 1.5°C. We highlight the 67% of terrestrial ecoregions that can meet 30% protection, thereby reducing extinction threats and carbon emissions from natural reservoirs. Freshwater and marine targets included here extend the GDN to all realms and provide a pathway to ensuring a more livable biosphere.

The umbrella species concept posits that protection of a single, wide-ranging species may confer protection to a large number of sympatric species. Due to their large home ranges, widespread distribution in the Mesoamerican Biodiversity Hotspot (MBH), and status as the focal species of numerous conservation initiatives, the jaguar Panthera onca is an ideal species to evaluate the umbrella strategy. After ground-truthing jaguar corridors from 2009 - 2016, we tested the umbrella value of jaguars for endemic herpetofauna (Amphibia, Reptilia) in Nuclear Central America (NCA), a ~ 370 000 km² sub-region of the MBH. NCA contains the greatest density of threatened reptiles in the Western Hemisphere and harbors extraordinary high diversity of amphibians, the most threatened class of vertebrate worldwide. Of the 304 regional endemics in NCA, the distributions of 187 (61.5 %) species of amphibians and reptiles overlapped ground-truthed jaguar range. The distributions of 14 reptiles, including a critically endangered Bothriechis spp. and two endangered Norops spp., occur exclusively within jaguar distribution. Similarly, the distributions of 19 amphibians, including four critically endangered Craugastor spp. and two critically endangered Plectrohyla spp. occur entirely within jaguar distribution. Our results indicate greater effectiveness of ground-truthed jaguar distribution than modeled and randomly selected networks in overlapping the distributions of endemic herpetofauna, especially threatened amphibians, in NCA. Substantiation of multi-taxa dependence on habitat in jaguar distribution would strengthen justification for wider application of the umbrella strategy beyond NCA and aid conservation planning in the MBH.

Abstract Successfully reintroducing rare plant populations to recover historical community composition may require multiple efforts and greater lengths of time than is typically devoted by researchers. To improve the probability of successful colonization and to learn about the life history of the regionally endangered mahogany mistletoe (Phoradendron rubrum) in the Florida Keys, United States, we conducted sequential augmentations for 10 years across two host tree sizes, two seed sources, and six recipient sites. Long‐term monitoring for 13 years revealed that sowing fresh seeds in dry periods from introduced versus wild plants onto small diameter trees (<20 cm diameter at breast height [dbh]) that had branch diameters 15–20 mm resulted in the greatest colonization success. An average of 38.7% of seeds germinated and 23.8% survived to 2015. Plant development was quite slow. Seeds required over 100 days to germinate, 1.6 years for cotyledon emergence, and over 4.7 years to produce fruit. We detected first recruitment nearly 8 years after installation. Population growth improved following multiple attempts and expanded spatial extent as is predicted by theory. Portions of the life cycle are undetectable and thus could give false indications of reintroduction success or failure. Achieving and documenting unequivocal success of this reintroduction has required over a decade.