Laser Voltage Probing

Laser voltage probing is a highly sophisticated physical attack technique where a laser is used to measure the voltage state of internal circuit nodes within a microchip. By scanning the chip with a laser, an attacker can observe the switching activity of transistors, which correlates with the data being processed by the system.

This allows the attacker to potentially extract private keys or observe the internal state of a secure cryptographic process. Because it requires expensive equipment and high precision, it is typically associated with state-level or well-funded adversarial actors.

For the financial sector, this highlights the extreme lengths that attackers will go to compromise the hardware securing large-scale assets. Defending against this requires complex chip-level design, such as top-metal routing layers that obscure the view of sensitive logic.