Fascinating preliminary research work. Side-channels in cryptography are infamous but it is clear that the concept of side-channels is a more generic concept ab

Fascinating preliminary research work. Side-channels in cryptography are infamous but it is clear that the concept of side-channels is a more generic concept about information leaking in ways that aren't typically considered and/or modeled. The fact that an accelerometer could detect vibrations from typing reminded me of this work on Acoustic Cryptanalysis [1]. It is a fascinating read. The authors found out that the PC Chips M754LMR motherboard had a bank of 1500µF capacitors near the CPU and power connector and of all the possible places, this was leaking information about the CPU's HLT idling state and otherwise. And it turns out that (at a proof-of-concept level) it was sufficient to break crypto implementations. [1] http://cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/ http://cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/