Sure. I for one have a huge weakness for this kind of tech, because it's an archetypal hack - a clever trick to pull something out of a system, whether the system likes it or not.

It's also interesting because it's deeply grounded in reality. It's no gluing crappy APIs together to solve a "problem" twenty layers deep in someone's convoluted business shenanigans. It's using reflected light to learn about mechanical vibrations at a distance, to show that the information is there, despite what you'd hear from people who don't comprehend how reality works. It's a nice reminder that everything that happens interacts with everything around it, and information about it spreads out at the speed of light. Most side channel attack are like this, which is why I find them interesting.

If you want to fight side-channel attacks, you can't put your head in the sand and pretend they don't exist (which seems to be most people's preferred reaction). You need to publicize them.

I wonder if that has something to do with how many cybersecurity policies are based on these weird edge cases and not on 99.999% of vulnerabilities.

The technology and the research has always been cool. That doesn’t mean people are happy with the application of it.

What you’ll also find is that the people who like the surveillance could barely give a crap about the technology that enables it.

The Venn diagram here isn’t one that completely overlaps.