In a recent study, researchers have been able to detect the presence of malware with the help of electromagnetic waves and the popular portable chipset called Raspberry Pi. A new device has been developed along with Raspberry Pi by the Research Institute of Computer Science and Random Systems in France. Along with the portable processor, the device uses an H-field probe and a Picoscope 6407 to find out the presence of malware on devices.
In the research paper that was published last month, the team wrote, “Our method does not require any modification on the target device. Thus, it can be deployed independently from the resources available without any overhead. Moreover, our approach has the advantage that it can hardly be detected and evaded by the malware authors.” During the study, the researchers used a design developed by Convolution Neural Networks to measure the traces of malware from a device. The team says that it was successfully able to detect the presence of malware with nearly perfect accuracy of 99.82%.
How does malware detector work?
Essentially, the device developed by researchers uses an H-field probe that is used to detect the presence of magnetic fields produced by weak signals. Additionally, the H-field probe is combined with a Picoscope that is used to detect and analyze the electric signals that are emitted by devices that run on electricity. Together with the Raspberry Pi, the malware detection device analyzes and detects the presence of abnormalities in the electromagnetic waves that are produced by computers that happen to have malware that can be used for computer hacking.
What is Raspberry Pi?
For those catching up, the Raspberry Pi is a system on a chip that comes with four cores of the ARM Cortex-A7 processor and an inbuilt GPU. It supports multiple versions of Linux, including Arch Linux and Debian. The processor can be used to plug in input devices such as a keyboard and a mouse. It can be plugged into a computer or a TV and be programmed by languages such as Python and Scratch. For those who wish to know the specifications of the Raspberry Pi 2, it has 1GB of RAM and a 900MHz quad-core processor that can support up to 4 USB ports and an HDMI port.
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