Energy harvesting is the process of capturing small amounts of power from the environment, such as sunlight, heat, vibration, or radio waves, to run electronic devices. In security engineering, it is common in remote sensors, asset trackers, and other low-power IoT systems that need to operate where replacing batteries is difficult or impossible. It matters because the power source shapes availability, uptime, and trust in the data the device produces.
In practice, energy harvesting can be a defense enabler: it lets monitoring devices stay deployed longer and supports resilient systems in isolated areas. But it also creates attack surface. If an attacker can shade a solar panel, block vibration, or otherwise reduce harvested power, they may force a device into shutdown, missed logging, or unreliable behavior. For that reason, secure designs pair harvesting hardware with power-aware software, tamper-resistant placement, and checks that distinguish genuine readings from data gaps caused by energy loss.