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A new chink has been found in the cryptographic armor that protects bank transactions, credit-card payments, and other secure Internet traffic. And although programmers have devised a patch for it, clever hackers might still be able to break through. The hack, presented in March at a computer security conference in Dresden, Germany, involves lowering the input voltage on a computer’s cryptography chip set and collecting the errors that leak out when the power-starved chips try and (sometimes) fail to encode messages. Crooks would then use those errors to reconstruct the secret key on which the encryption is based. More important, say the hack’s creators, the same attack could also be performed from afar on stressed systems, such as computer motherboards that run too hot or Web servers that run too fast.

When the Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller appeared in 2005, it featured a set of female pin headers exposing most of the pins of the ATmega168 for easy hacking and for connecting accessory boards known as 'Shields'. The purpose of a shield is to provide new plug-and-play functionality to the host microcontroller, such as circuit prototyping, motion control, sensor integration, network and radio communication, or gaming interfaces, without worrying too much about the hardware implementation details. Seven years after the birth of the original Arduino, new shields keep coming out and are being cataloged on http://shieldlist.org/, a testament to the versatility of the design. It is also simple to build a DIY shield when nothing out there will meet your needs or when you want to understand how the shield concept works from the ground up.