A security researcher has a devised a novel attack on online anonymity systems in which he literally takes a computer's temperature over the internet. The attack uses a phenomenon called "clock skew" -- the tendency for the precise clocks in modern computers to drift off of the correct time at slightly different rates, which can be affected by heat. "When a crystal is manufactured, it has a clock skew, and it's different for each crystal (throughout its) lifetime," explains Steven J. Murdoch, a Cambridge University researcher who discussed his work at the Chaos Communications Congress on Thursday.

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