This happened in the early 1990s, when I was a young engineer starting an internship at one of the companies that helped create the smart card industry. I believed my card was secure. I believed the system worked. But watching strangers casually extract something that was supposed to be secret and protected was a shock. It was also the moment I realized how insecure security actually is, and the devastating impact security breaches could have on individuals, global enterprises, and governments.
Researchers at UC Irvine uncovered a vulnerability that enables some gaming mice with polling rates of 4,000 Hz or higher many of which are developed in the Bay Area to be turned into spyware, capturing conversations through desk vibrations using AI. As Tom's Hardware reports, security researchers from the University of California Irvine found a way to use high-end optical gaming mice containing advanced sensors that can sample data up to 8,000 times per second, per Hoodline, to record users' conversations via desk vibrations.
A key aspect of Microsoft's hardware security is isolation. Encryption keys are stored in an integrated hardware security module (HSM), while VMs are isolated from one another using trusted execution environments (TEE) baked into modern CPUs and GPUs. The control, data, networking, and storage planes are all offloaded to smartNICs and an open source Root of Trust (RoT) module ensures everything is what it purports to be.
