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MIT engineers develop a magnetic transistor for more energy-efficient electronics
Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.
MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity.
The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance.
The material’s unique magnetic properties also allow for transistors with built-in memory, which would simplify circuit design and unlock new applications for high-performance electronics.
“People have known about magnets for thousands of years, but there are very limited ways to incorporate magnetism into electronics. We have shown a new way to efficiently utilize magnetism that opens up a lot of possibilities for future applications and research,” says Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT graduate student in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Physics, and co-lead author of a paper on this advance.
Chou is joined on the paper by co-lead author Eugene Park, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Julian Klein, a DMSE research scientist; Josep Ingla-Aynes, a postdoc in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Jagadeesh S. Moodera, a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics; and senior authors Frances Ross, TDK Professor in DMSE; and Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. The paper appears today in Physical Review Letters.
Overcoming the limits
In an electronic device, silicon semiconductor transistors act like tiny light switches that turn a circuit on and off, or amplify weak signals in a communication system. They do this using a small input voltage.
But a fundamental physical limit of silicon semiconductors prevents a transistor from operating below a certain voltage, which hinders its energy efficiency.
To make more efficient electronics, researchers have spent decades working toward magnetic transistors that utilize electron spin to control the flow of electricity. Electron spin is a fundamental property that enables electrons to behave like tiny magnets.
So far, scientists have mostly been limited to using certain magnetic materials. These lack the favorable electronic properties of semiconductors, constraining device performance.
“In this work, we combine magnetism and semiconductor physics to realize useful spintronic devices,” Liu says.
The researchers replace the silicon in the surface layer of a transistor with chromium sulfur bromide, a two-dimensional material that acts as a magnetic semiconductor.
Due to the material’s structure, researchers can switch between two magnetic states very cleanly. This makes it ideal for use in a transistor that smoothly switches between “on” and “off.”
“One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding the right material. We tried many other materials that didn’t work,” Chou says.
They discovered that changing these magnetic states modifies the material’s electronic properties, enabling low-energy operation. And unlike many other 2D materials, chromium sulfur bromide remains stable in air.
To make a transistor, the researchers pattern electrodes onto a silicon substrate, then carefully align and transfer the 2D material on top. They use tape to pick up a tiny piece of material, only a few tens of nanometers thick, and place it onto the substrate.
“A lot of researchers will use solvents or glue to do the transfer, but transistors require a very clean surface. We eliminate all those risks by simplifying this step,” Chou says.
Leveraging magnetism
This lack of contamination enables their device to outperform existing magnetic transistors. Most others can only create a weak magnetic effect, changing the flow of current by a few percent or less. Their new transistor can switch or amplify the electric current by a factor of 10.
They use an external magnetic field to change the magnetic state of the material, switching the transistor using significantly less energy than would usually be required.
The material also allows them to control the magnetic states with electric current. This is important because engineers cannot apply magnetic fields to individual transistors in an electronic device. They need to control each one electrically.
The material’s magnetic properties could also enable transistors with built-in memory, simplifying the design of logic or memory circuits.
A typical memory device has a magnetic cell to store information and a transistor to read it out. Their method can combine both into one magnetic transistor.
“Now, not only are transistors turning on and off, they are also remembering information. And because we can switch the transistor with greater magnitude, the signal is much stronger so we can read out the information faster, and in a much more reliable way,” Liu says.
Building on this demonstration, the researchers plan to further study the use of electrical current to control the device. They are also working to make their method scalable so they can fabricate arrays of transistors.
This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. The work was partially carried out at the MIT.nano facilities.
🏃 Fitness Tracker Privacy Fails | EFFector 38.14
Watches, bands, and rings—if you want to digitally monitor your fitness, more companies than ever are selling devices to do it. And more Americans than ever now own at least one wearable health device. But what are the companies that make fitness trackers doing to protect our sensitive data from prying eyes? A lot less than they could be, it turns out. We're explaining what companies can do to protect your health data, and more, with our EFFector newsletter.
For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This issue covers the rapid rise of police drone programs, a disappointing ruling on electronic device searches at the U.S. border, and how fitness trackers are falling down when it comes to protecting our health data.
Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time, we're chatting with EFF Senior Security and Privacy Activist Thorin Klosowski about the health fitness tracker landscape and your privacy. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:
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Long-Lived Vulnerability in Microsoft Secure Boot
Microsoft’s Secure Boot has had a serious vulnerability for most of its existence.
An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researchers at security firm ESET after identifying 11 firmware images, at least one from 2013, that were known to be defective but remained signed by the software company anyway.
The images are known as shims, which were invented to extend Secure Boot to Linux devices and utility software. Using a technique simple enough to be performed by novice hackers, these old, forgotten shims can be used to completely circumvent the protection, which is embedded into the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) of the device’s motherboard. The gaffe is the result of the failure by Microsoft, which oversees the signing of shims, to revoke the publicly available images once vulnerabilities were found in them...
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Measuring LLMs’ Ability to Perform Cryptanalysis
There’s new benchmark measuring AI’s ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis. Anthropic’s frontier model actually found new attacks.
The benchmark: “CryptanalysisBench: Can LLMs do Cryptanalysis?” The idea is to benchmark the ability of LLMs to discover new mathematical cryptanalytic attacks against a series of historical algorithms.
Abstract: Cryptanalysis—the task of finding attacks against cryptographic schemes—its at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and cybersecurity, two areas where LLMs have advanced fastest. Cryptanalysis represents both a clean testbed for frontier reasoning (as practical attacks can be automatically verified) and a domain with unusually high stakes, since the primitives under study underpin our digital security. In this paper we ask whether LLMs can do cryptanalysis, and find that the answer is increasingly yes. We introduce CryptanalysisBench, 191 tasks across six families of cryptographic primitives (block ciphers, hash functions, etc.) drawn primarily from four NIST standardization competitions. Our benchmark consists of three tiers: (i) primitives with known practical breaks; (ii) primitives with no known practical break, evaluated both at full strength and as scaled-down variants; and (iii) a challenge set of production primitives at the frontier of cryptanalysis. Five frontier models (Claude Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, Mythos 5, GPT-5.5, and the open-weights GLM-5.2) break 65%86% of Tier 1 schemes, 612 Tier-2 schemes at full strength, and 2461 across all scaled-down variants. Beyond deriving known results, models produce novel cryptanalysis, such as a key-recovery attack that exploits a design flaw in the SpoC AEAD and an error in KINDI’s published CCA-security proof, both to the best of our knowledge not previously known...
San Francisco: Don’t Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing
The concept of “surveillance pricing” is just one part of a much larger problem and business model: corporations maximizing their profits by invading our privacy. The all-too-common business model is to systematically harvest, collate, and store as much of our personal data as possible, and then monetize it through use and sale. When it comes to surveillance pricing, that looks like corporations offering the same product to two different people at two different prices, based on harvested personal information. That's why EFF supports A.B. 2654, authored by Assemblymember Chris Ward, which bans this harmful practice.
As an organization based in San Francisco, EFF was proud to learn that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors had also introduced a resolution to similarly support the legislation. However, we were disappointed to learn the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has since stalled a vote on the resolution stating their own support for A.B. 2654 after receiving an email from the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce criticizing the bill using well-worn and debunked concerns. We’ve sent the Supervisors a letter asking them to reconsider.
Banning surveillance pricing would be good for consumers. The FTC has found that companies will set higher prices based on personal information. “For instance,” the FTC found last year, “if a consumer is profiled as a new parent, the consumer may intentionally be shown higher-priced baby thermometers on the first page of their in-app search results, based on their residential zip code and time of purchase.” Let's say that again: the U.S. government has found that companies may seek to use surveillance pricing to charge parents searching for a thermometer in the middle of the night more money in a time of need.
Privacy is a human right, not something that people should understand as a currency to give away or protect based on how it will impact the price of groceries. EFF has long opposed pay-for-privacy schemes, in which a company charges a higher price to a customer who refuses to submit to processing of their personal data. Surveillance pricing is another version of that practice. You should never have to worry that your privacy rights depend on how much you make.
At a time when prices for everyday goods continue to climb, some surveillance pricing defenders note that using personal information could lead to lower prices for some consumers. Yet some recent studies indicate there will be losers and winners based on factors such as whether a consumer is willing or able to switch products. Who loses or wins also will turn on the accuracy of the underlying data – yet surveillance pricing is often based on false information.
That said, even if surveillance pricing has the capability to lead to lower prices (which it often doesn't) we oppose it as just another way that corporations try to make customers pay for their privacy.
The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce’s concerns are fully addressed in the text of A.B. 2654. The Chamber raises questions about how businesses will comply with the law. But the bill is quite clear: “a retailer shall not engage in surveillance pricing.” It also has a clear definition of what “surveillance pricing” is. The banned practice is defined as: “[i] a customized price for a good for a specific consumer or group of consumers, [ii] based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information collected through electronic surveillance,” including if that information is “acquired from a third party.” In other words, “surveillance pricing” is a customized price based on personal information.
The SF Chamber’s letter also asks about the bill's “treatment of discounts and loyalty programs.” In this way, too, A.B. 2654 is quite clear. The bill includes three broad carveouts that ensure it doesn't disrupt loyalty programs and discounts:
- First, for price differences “based solely on costs associated with providing the good to different consumers.”
- Second, for a discount offered to a consumer who is taking steps to terminate a service.
- Third, for a discount, conspicuously posted on a retailer’s website, that is uniformly available based on (1) criteria anyone can meet, such as signing up for a mailing list, (2) membership in a broadly defined group, such as seniors, or (3) participation in a loyalty program.
An opt-in senior discount to the movies is not the problem. The systematic collection of all of our personal information to determine whether someone is a senior and if so whether they should pay more or less for that matinee is.
As we said in our blog post outlining our support for this bill:
Surveillance pricing is very similar to online behavioral advertising, a business practice that EFF urges governments to ban. Both practices incentivize all businesses to collect as much of our personal data as possible, in order to later monetize it. Both practices lead some businesses to collate and store our data into dossiers about us for later use. Both practices use these surveillance-based dossiers to manipulate and limit our economic choices, by altering the advertisements and prices we see online.
We urge the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to join the coalition of groups that support A.B. 2564, and stand against companies mining our personal information to charge us different prices for the same thing.
You can read our letter to the Supervisors here.
Professor Emeritus Robert Cohen, pioneering polymers researcher and devoted mentor, dies at 79
Robert E. Cohen, the Raymond A. (1921) and Helen E. St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering, Emeritus, whose pioneering research helped shape the fields of polymers and soft matter while inspiring generations of students, passed away peacefully on July 9 following a long battle with Parkinson's disease. He was 79.
"Bob Cohen was an innovator in every sense of the word: in his research, his approach to mentorship, and in every aspect of our community at MIT," says Kristala Prather '94, the Arthur D. Little Professor and head of the Department of Chemical Engineering (ChemE). "Bob combined extraordinary intellect with remarkable humility. As a teacher, colleague, advisor, and friend, he had a gift for making people feel respected, valued, and heard. That generosity shaped every part of his work and inspired everyone fortunate enough to know him."
During more than four decades at MIT, Cohen continually reimagined how chemical engineering students should be educated. Recruited for his expertise in polymer science, he brought to MIT the polymer laboratory course he had developed during his postdoctoral work at the University of Oxford, establishing class 10.467 (Polymer Science Laboratory). The rigorous undergraduate course introduced generations of students to polymer synthesis, physical chemistry, and the evaluation of mechanical properties through hands-on experimentation.
In 1986, Cohen founded the Program in Polymer Science and Technology, now known as the Program in Polymers and Soft Matter (PPSM). Recognizing that advances in polymer science require expertise spanning chemistry, physics, engineering, and materials science, he created one of MIT's first truly interdisciplinary graduate programs. PPSM continues to prepare doctoral students to tackle complex challenges across the broad field of polymers and soft materials.
"Bob Cohen is the reason I returned to MIT as a graduate student," says Paula Hammond '84, PhD '93, Institute professor, dean of the School of Engineering, and a PPSM alumna. "His vision for multidisciplinary polymer education was unlike anything I had experienced. I benefited from him as a teacher in the classroom, as a member of my thesis committee, and a life-long mentor. As a department head, I saw firsthand the extraordinary impact he had on generations of students and on the field itself."
Cohen also conceived the unique PhD in chemical engineering practice (PhDCEP) degree, recognizing that future leaders in chemical engineering would benefit from combining advanced research with industrial experience and business education. The first and only program if its kind, the PhDCEP program integrates coursework, MIT's renowned David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice, doctoral research, and study at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Cohen also founded and directed the DuPont/MIT Alliance from 2000 to 2012, creating a highly successful partnership that brought together researchers from MIT and DuPont to develop innovative materials and manufacturing technologies. The collaboration advanced research in bioelectronics, biomimetic materials, alternative energy, and metabolic engineering, while fostering lasting collaborations across disciplines.
Cohen was a prolific collaborator whose pioneering research established him as one of the world's leading chemical engineers. His contributions include omniphobic surfaces, block copolymer nanoreactors for inorganic cluster synthesis, tough-stiff nanocomposites, chain folding in confined geometries, and layer-by-layer assemblies at the biotic-abiotic interface. Yet when asked about his proudest accomplishments, he rarely pointed to his scientific discoveries. Instead, he spoke about his students, and took immense pride in watching many former PhD students go on to become faculty members and leaders at top institutions around the world.
Raised in Oil City, Pennsylvania, Cohen developed an early appreciation for chemical engineering. After earning his master's and doctoral degrees from Caltech and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford, he joined the MIT faculty in 1973. Over the next four decades, he became internationally recognized as a groundbreaking researcher, educator, entrepreneur, and mentor.
Cohen was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the Polymer Division of the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society. Cohen co-founded MatTek Corp., helping translate advances in biomaterials into practical applications.
Although Cohen received many prestigious honors throughout his career, he often said the award that meant the most to him was the inaugural Paul J. Flory Polymer Education Award, presented by the American Chemical Society in 2012. The honor recognized his leadership in building the interdisciplinary PPSM program and transforming undergraduate polymer education. Fittingly, it celebrated what he valued most: helping students discover their potential.
Cohen is survived by his beloved wife, Jane; his son, Eliot Cohen, his wife Jacqueline Aldred Cohen, and their children Ada, Brennan, and Callan; his daughter, Genevieve Cohen, and her daughter Emma; his sister, Nancy Stein, and her husband Herb; sisters-in-law Lee Woodman and Betsy Woodman; brother-in-law Wally Coleman; and many beloved nieces and nephews.
A memorial service is scheduled for Oct. 17 at the MIT Chapel. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Cohen’s memory to the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
Yu Deng ’11 and Hong Wang PhD ’19 awarded Fields Medal
MIT alumni Yu Deng ’11 and Hong Wang PhD ’19 were among the four young mathematicians awarded Fields Medals on July 23 at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). The other two honorees were John Pardon and Jacob Tsimerman.
The Fields Medal is awarded once every four years at the ICM, and is regarded as one of the highest honors a mathematician can receive.
Yu Deng received his BS in mathematics at MIT in 2011, and was a Putnam Fellow in 2010. He earned his Fields Medal for his work in partial differential equations (PDE), including the rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics for rarefied gases, the derivation of wave kinetic equations from nonlinear dispersive systems, and probabilistic approaches to nonlinear Schrödinger dynamics. His first published paper (in Analysis & PDE) was on the latter topic, and stemmed from summer research conducted at MIT on a problem suggested by Gigliola Staffilani. Deng is currently a professor at the University of Chicago.
Hong Wang received her PhD at MIT in 2019 under the supervision of Larry Guth PhD ’05. She is awarded the Fields Medal for her work in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including applications of multiscale and decoupling techniques to the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation, and other major advances such as the solution of the Kakeya problem in three dimensions (with Joshua Zahl). As a student in the department, she was a graduate mentor in the Summer Program in Undergraduate Research (SPUR) and, alongside her mentee, was awarded the Hartley Rogers Jr. SPUR Prize, presented to the best student-mentor team. Wang, a Silver Professor of Mathematics at New York University and a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris, is the third woman ever to win a Fields Medal.
“The achievements of Yu Deng and Hong Wang are truly monumental, and we are all elated that they were awarded Fields Medals,” department head and RSA Professor of Mathematics Michel Goemans says. “Their success is a testimony of the amazing mathematical talent we have at all levels at MIT, and the top-quality education, mentorship, and research opportunities we provide to both our large pool of math majors and our PhD students, during their lifelong mathematical journey.”
Goemans adds, “MIT is a unique and exciting place to learn mathematics, and I am sure we have more future Fields medalists among our students and junior members of the department.”
Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?
Recent reports have raised alarm about the use of PatronScan, an ID-checking and face-scanning system, at multiple LGBTQ+ bars in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. Much of the attention has focused on reports that the system photographs patrons as they enter venues and questions about whether those images are used for facial recognition.
A broader privacy concern also deserves scrutiny. For years, PatronScan has marketed itself not just as an ID-verification tool, but as a system that allows bars and clubs to identify patrons, keep records about them, and share information across venues. As one news article published in 2019 documented, PatronScan built a network that allowed participating bars to flag patrons and share information about them with other establishments.
And in California, it’s not at all clear how PatronScan’s business model of scanning IDs and sharing the information from those scans with other bars comports with the law. California’s ID privacy law, which was amended in 2018 to add ID “scans,” states that no businesses shall “retain or use” any information from a scanned ID card except for limited purposes such as to verify age, comply with a legal requirement, or prevent fraud.
A venue cannot claim to be a safe space while feeding its patrons’ data to a third party database.
Californians should be deeply concerned about businesses that collect information from government-issued IDs and use it to build databases about where people go, whom they associate with, and whether they should be allowed into other public gathering places. That concern is especially strong in LGBTQ+ spaces, which have long served as refuges for people to go without being tracked, monitored, or put on lists.
We reached out to Patronscan with questions regarding their practices and their views on California ID law. They referred us to their published FAQ question “Is Patronscan privacy compliant in California?” which claims that the use of Patronscan kiosks is legal in California. They also said “Patronscan does not do facial recognition in North America, or any kind of automated analysis of the ID or the live photo image.”
The California Legislature Has Investigated PatronScan’s Business ModelIn 2018, the California Legislature published bill analyses that went into detail about PatronScan’s business. Reviewing PatronScan's own materials, the California Senate Judiciary Committee found that the company had collected and retained information on 561,087 customers in Sacramento alone during the first five months of 2018—a remarkable figure for a city whose population had only recently topped 500,000.
Lawmakers also found that at that time, PatronScan retained information for at least 90 days or longer in some cases, shared information among participating bars, and maintained bans that lasted an average of more than 19 years. A PatronScan “Public Safety Report” used 10,000 scans collected on a single day to report on “where customers live, how far they have traveled, and how many different venues the customers patronized.”
This was not simply checking IDs at the door. PatronScan was building a database.
An immigrants’ rights group, the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), wrote about its concern at the time with these growing ID databases, saying that “placing individuals on a database that labels them a "threat to public safety" has “significant immigration consequences that could lead to deportation, revoking of current status, or denial of future immigration relief.”
Today, Patronscan states that it retains personal information about all customers for 21 days, and about flagged customers for up to five years. This includes the customer’s name, date of birth, photograph, gender, and zip code. It also includes the dates and times that the customer entered particular bars. Such databases are a grave privacy threat. Personal data is routinely stolen by thieves, misused by a company’s employees, seized by government agencies, and diverted to new purposes by a company’s executives.
California Law Still Bans ID-Scan Databases, And Bars Should Follow That LawIn 2018, California lawmakers closed what they viewed as a loophole. Existing law already prohibited businesses from retaining or using information obtained when they “swiped” a driver's license, except for the narrow purposes of legal requirements (like a judicial warrant) or “preventing fraud, abuse, or material misrepresentation.”
After reviewing companies like PatronScan, the Legislature amended the law to make clear that the same restrictions that apply to businesses that “swipe” ID cards also apply when those IDs are “scanned.” PatronScan opposed that change, arguing it wanted to preserve the ability to share information among bars so participating venues could decide whether to admit patrons.
The bill became law anyway. Yet PatronScan continues to market and sell a system that apparently retains information from scanned IDs, and allows participating venues to flag patrons and share information across its network.
At a minimum, that raises serious questions about how those practices fit with California's existing ID privacy law. Bar and nightlife venue owners who utilize PatronScan should think twice about its effects on their customers, and consider going back to standard, visual ID checks. These physical checks have been effective at keeping underage patrons out of 21-and-over venues for decades, and don’t present the serious privacy dangers of creating a private database of bar patrons.
For venues serving vulnerable communities like immigrants or the LGBTQ+ community, the stakes of using this technology are even higher. It’s disappointing and alarming to see some of California’s more well-known LGBTQ+ nightlife spots instead lining up as PatronScan’s early adopters. A venue cannot claim to be a safe space while feeding its patrons’ data to a third party database. These businesses should reject PatronScan, return to the standard ID checks that every other bar has been able to utilize, and prove to their customers that their privacy and security still matters.
Axon Is Another License Plate Surveillance Company
Governments are switching, but I’m not sure it makes a difference:
…some municipalities, including Denver, Colorado, are ditching their Flock arrays. But keep in mind that if they’re only switching from Flock to another brand of license-plate readers, like Axon, it’s like a gambling addict trying to kick the habit by switching from FanDuel to DraftKings.
[…]
Despite what you may read on the Flock website, Axon cameras are pretty effective when it comes to hoovering up personal details that can go far beyond your license plate numbers. That means a municipality that opts for Axon cameras instead of Flock units won’t necessarily reduce the amount privacy its citizens lose through their use...
