An alarm system against hardware attacks

Radio-monitored: An electromagnetic signal transmitter and receiver antenna can detect hardware attacks on a circuit board because the attack changes the characteristic radio wave pattern in the device. Michael Schwettmann - Two simple antennas can protect computer hardware against physical manipulation Radio waves could protect computers, as well as card readers, from attacks on their hardware. As a team from the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum and the Ruhr University in Bochum has shown, the signal from one antenna in a device generates a characteristic electromagnetic pattern that is received by a second antenna. If an attacker manipulates the device with a wire, for example, the radio wave pattern changes and blows the whistle on the manipulation like an alarm system. Payment transactions, business secrets, documents that are important for national security: today, the world's most valuable secrets are often no longer stored on paper, but rather as ones and zeros in virtual space. When we suspect that these secrets are in danger, we usually imagine a threat from afar - attackers trying to capture confidential data through cyberattacks via the internet. But there is another threat, a much more direct way to get into other people's systems, namely by tampering with the hardware.