Toward a Stronger Defense of Personal Data

Adam Zewe | MIT News Office
February 18, 2022

MIT researchers have developed an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip, that can be implemented on an internet of things device to defend against power-based side-channel attacks.

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.