Interesting security concern.. At the next Defcon someone announces they've hacked the NSA by weighing their computer to find the number of 1s and 0s.

… or a new exfiltration technique even for air-gapped devices

Yeah, that does sound like a Defcon talk.

I know you're being funny, but researchers in a lab got an encryption key by listening on the spinning discs if I remember the paper correctly. Was front-page few years ago.

Yeah, I've read quite a few stories like that, so that was only half a joke. Even the CPU stuff like Spectre and meltdown are almost as crazy.

Technically flash memory storage would weigh more as a 1 (or maybe as a 0, depending), since it works by storing electrons. Apparently it stores something like 500 electrons [1]. My phone has 6 GB of storage, so if they are all ones that gives an extra weight of 2.50e-13 g, which is 0.0001 nanograms. Probably not measurable, though, especially since the large mass of the phone relative to the change in mass eliminates a lot of sensitive measurement techniques.

I'm not sure if RAM would have extra weight, as I know less about how it works.

[1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/505361/how-m...

That link never mentions that a 1 requires more (or fewer, for that matter) electrons than a 0 though.