By intercepting current fluctuations or causing errors via electromagnetic pulses, devices such as smartphones and key cards become vulnerable to attacks. The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and several project partners have developed a method in order to protect data from physical attacks - for example by making hardware implementations of current encryption independently dodge attackers.

While digital encryption offers a high level of security through complex mathematical processes, data protection at the physical level requires different, often complex approaches. For instance, information can be hidden in tables with randomly changing masks or encryptions in the computer chip can change their location by themselves. In order to develop and research such methods, the DFKI Cyber-Physical Systems research department has been working on the project "Security by Reconfiguration" (SecRec) for three years.