I did not know that we are born with embedded hacking tools (I am excluding the Brain here).
From the Article
There are flaws and weaknesses in human flesh and bones that make it easier than it should be to force someone to offer up the key to decrypt something.
This research is a side-channel attack. The metal parts of a laptop, such as the shielding around USB ports, and heat sink fins, are notionally all at a common ground level. However, this level undergoes tiny fluctuations due to the electric fields within the laptop. These variations can be measured, and this can be used to leak information about encryption keys.
the researchers also experimented with using a smartphone connected to Ethernet shielding via its headphone port, and found that this was sufficient to perform some attacks.
Robust protection is hard to do, because
- The side-channel is largely a feature of the hardware.
- Faraday cages can protect against electromagnetic side channels,
- insulation can protect against this kind of "touching metal parts" attack,
- optical fibres can protect against measuring fluctuations in Ethernet connections
but all these drive up costs and are of limited practicality.
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