Feb 28, 2022
New Chip Can Prevent Hackers From Extracting Hidden Information From Smart Devices
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: biotech/medical, health, robotics/AI
Engineers build a lower-energy chip that can prevent hackers from extracting hidden information from a smart device.
A heart attack patient, recently discharged from the hospital, is using a smartwatch to help monitor his electrocardiogram signals. The smartwatch may seem secure, but the neural network processing that health information is using private data that could still be stolen by a malicious agent through a side-channel attack.
A side-channel attack seeks to gather secret information by indirectly exploiting a system or its hardware. In one type of side-channel attack, a savvy hacker could monitor fluctuations in the device’s power consumption while the neural network is operating to extract protected information that “leaks” out of the device.