Cryptography Is Dead?

"Dan [Boneh] also talked about some covert-channel work that he recently did. He has developed a method for identifying your cell phone via its hardware. He uses the fact that each phone measures acceleration slightly differently. His attack measures over many times the acceleration of the phone, and then compares the values. Since all phones—it appears–make slightly different errors in their measurements, he can convert this into a unique signature of the phone. Obviously there are ways to stop this: the simplest is to disallow any script from reading the values of the phone’s acceleration measurements. But the fact that this is a viable attack is surprising to me."

By the way, don't be deterred by the link-baity title. The article summarizes what four of the founders of the field of cryptography, including Rivest and Shamir, said at an industry conference. And the author, Dick Lipton, is a well-known researcher in the theory of computation.