In their academic paper entitled, “Private Circuits: Securing Hardware Against Probing Attacks,” Yuval Ishai, Amit Sahai, and David Wagner raise the question, Could anyone guarantee secrecy even if an adversary could eavesdrop on someone’s brain? This question was prompted, say the authors, by side-channel attacks that could give an adversary partial access to hardware’s inner workings. Recent research has shown that side-channel attacks pose a very serious threat to cryptosystems with embedded devices. The authors discuss how to protect privacy by proposing ways to build private circuits able to resist such attacks. This is a highly technical paper.

See Also: Cracking; Eavesdrop; Privacy; Privacy Laws.