Researchers have developed a way to peek inside electronic parts as they're running and plan to see if they can snoop encrypted data

A 1952 close-up photograph of an RCA lab technician using a magnifying glass to inspect a new transistor.

Terahertz waves have been an exciting area of research in the past few years because they can be used to examine the internal structures of objects without the risks associated with X-rays. Now one research team has used the tiny waves to peer into the inner workings of transistors while they're operating, and is exploring whether the technique could be used to read any data stored in a chip.

As reported by IEEE Spectrum (via Tom's Hardware), the multinational research group (comprising engineers from universities in Australia, Germany, and the USA) studied the behaviour of 'packaged semiconductor devices' in the low/sub-terahertz part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is roughly in the boundary where microwaves and infrared waves overlap, in terms of wavelength.