An electrical engineering professor and his student at Tel Aviv University (TAU) said they have discovered a way to seal an unlikely security loophole in supposedly 'secure' microchips that encode data in everything from credit cards to satellite televisions. 'Companies need to know how secure their chip is, and how it can be cracked,' says Prof. Avishai Wool. 'They need to know what they're up against.' So cryptologists, like Wool said, to catch a thief, one has to think like a thief. 'We need to think like the attackers,' he says, 'in order to raise the bar against them,' Wool said. One way to tease secret information out of a chip, according to Wool, is through its power supply. By carefully measuring the microscopic fluctuations in how much electricity the chip draws in use and interpreting the changes via certain algorithms, Wool said he and his Ph.D. student Yossi Oren can decipher the contents. But what happens when there are several different processes taking place at once, making for a noisy soup of signals all mixed together? Wool and Oren said they have written programming capable of analyzing and cutting through the noise and retrieving the wanted data, according to a statement from the university sent to Xinhua. The development exploits the same 'constraint programming' that is used for scheduling in the travel industry -- a sort of directed 'data mining' that knows where to find that one shiny needle in the haystack. Wool has provided some of his discoveries to U.S. passport authorities, in order to help them make embedded chips in passports more secure, the statement said. The duo recently presented their findings at the 12th Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES), according to TAU. 