Computers are physical objects, although it's easy for programmers to forget this. Recently the information security world has been rediscovering this fact through a series of interesting attacks and threats that focus on the physical nature of computers and communications media. I'll discuss some of these attacks and research results, including the cold boot attack against memory that I worked on last year, and consider where security is headed.

Seth Schoen has served as Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2001. In this role, he works to bridge the legal and technical worlds and explain how the design of technology affects individual freedom. His poetry about DRM has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal.