’We can protect anything that consumes power’

Engineering professor takes new cybersecurity technology out of the lab and into the real world. By Brian Caldwell Faculty of Engineering - It has been a long but rewarding journey since Sebastian Fischmeister first hit on the concept of using involuntary emissions such as power consumption as a window into the workings of computer systems. Early work on the idea as a means of debugging programs without shutting them down earned the electrical and computer engineering professor a best paper award soon after he came to the University of Waterloo. And now, more than a dozen years and an important pivot later, Fischmeister, his research team and a spinoff hardware company are using the novel approach to help protect Ontario municipalities from costly, disruptive cyberattacks. "It feels great to see technology make the transition from pen and paper, from a theoretical idea, to the actual detection of spreading ransomware to protect computing systems," he says. Looking back, Fischmeister says it would have been easy to only pursue the idea of using side-channel information - such as sound, heat, radio frequency and power consumption - as warning signs of attack in a string of academic papers. But he was encouraged by the entrepreneurial support system and, crucially, creator-owned intellectual property policy at Waterloo to take his theory out of the lab and into "the real, messy world." The result is Palitronica Inc.