In May 2020, Sacramento, California, resident Alfonso Nguyen was alarmed to find two Sacramento County Sheriff’s deputies at his door, accusing him of illegally growing cannabis and demanding entry into his home. When Nguyen refused the search and denied the allegation, one deputy allegedly called him a liar and threatened to arrest him.
That same year, deputies from the same department, with their guns drawn and bullhorns and sirens sounding, fanned out around the home of Brian Decker, another Sacramento resident. The officers forced Decker to walk backward out of his home in only his underwear around 7 am while his neighbors watched. The deputies said that he, too, was under suspicion of illegally growing cannabis.
I don’t know enough about this topic to judge what is / isn’t wrong with this comment. Could someone who is downvoting also reply to explain what’s wrong?
The articles relate to tracking behaviour (IE watching TV, playing video games, cooking, showering, sleeping, out & about), not deciphering what your computer is doing.
Maybe they can tell if you are just browsing the internet, or if you are playing video games. But you could just as easily be training AI models, rendering some animations, 3d modelling or mining buttcoin.
The articles allude to “knowing it’s a computer being used” because the noise of it’s PSU is different than lightbulbs or fridges.
Data centers use UPS battery banks to provide persistent power during a power outage to cover the gap before backup generators start up.
Data centers use power smoothing systems to protect wiring and switch gear, as well as fixing the Power Factor - which will drastically reduce their electricity bill.
The power required to generate
00001111Vs11110000is the same from an outside perspective. 4 bits on, 4 bits off. And computers have a word size of 64 bits. That’s a lot of permutations that a miniscule ripple in current might indicate.And all ICs in a computer will have local decoupling caps (because the same power noise that “can be decoded by a power meter” interferes with the ICs, so it is filtered).
And the the SMPS will have some chonky smoothing caps, and the MOSFETs chopping that at 100kHz or whatever. Lots of smoothing, and lots of more significant noise sources.
Nothing upstream of the PSU is going to be able to read what’s going on inside a PC, other than “it’s drawing a few watts more”.
Now, maybe there are security minded companies that take things to the extreme.
Having a central DC power system that powers 100s of servers has the benefit of mixing all that potential noise together into an even more incomprehensible noise.
So, I can see some companies spending tens of thousands more just in case someone manages to break physics. Because 20k on an install could save millions later.
But if they are paying that much attention to the data security of power, I hope it’s an air gapped system.
Or they’ve been sold some snake oil.
Seriously, noise on the power is not a data security issue.
It is a privacy issue if power companies are tracking it that closely, because they can model your behaviour.
Which is what the articles are talking about
I think he is mistaking the method of power analysis to defeat cryptography with whatever the fuck he’s talking about
For the record, board power analysis cannot be done by your power provider
Thanks! That is helpful, I appreciate it
Just a side note - while the original comment wasn’t directly speaking about this, and something like this requires way more precise instruments amd can’t be done just from your total energy consumption, it is kind of possible to in theory decode/steal data from your PC based on it’s pwer consumption, such as stealing private cryptography keys.
It’s mostly theoretical and very specific attack, but I find things like that super cool so I kist wanted to share them. The whole area of Side channel attacks is cool.
same, I’m preplexed, when the other thread is literally proving what I’m warning about.
Electronic magnetic interference and light bending tracking is something we’ve known for awhile in physics.