PITA anyone?

[url]http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/23/pita-radio-wave-hack/[/url]

How would one shield a laptop from emitting such waves in the first place. First it was ability to get keys from monitoring the usb power fluctuations, then from GPU emissions and now with with little to no contact whatsoever. I think that with a better receiver you could do this across the room, and not just 19 feet away. It’s a bad rep for software defined radios though.

@ Mr. John Smith - Time to start building houses as faraday cages. :slight_smile:

Though that might make it a wee bit harder to use a cell phone indoors, I suppose.

Really? I bet the SDR folks are smiling with glee right now. What an amazing technology to be able to accomplish this - scary as it is. This certainly isn’t a negative for SDR but more so a negative for hardware shielding. You can bet that government grade laptops will undergo this type of testing during purchase decisions in the future.

Though the fix in this case was to the change the order of operations in GnuPG algorithm. GnuPG leaked information because the pattern of machine-level math operations was closely coupled to key structure. By decoupling the order of operations from the key contents, GnuPG defeated this attack. Security in depth is what one wants to shoot for, so I would think that both shielding and randomization of the instruction stream will both become standard issue for anyone who wants to truly lock down their crypto.

Google “red black criteria” or TEMPEST. First heard about this concept in 1965.

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In some respects true. After all, this is a passive attack; the radio isn’t broadcasting anything. If anything, it will create an opportunity for the use of light in stead of electrons, since optical data transmission in a closed system is nigh impossible to snoop. I wonder what will happen when someone discovers a side channel attack on new model Jeeps :whistle: