[guardian-dev] Smartphones: Acoustic Key Breakers

Natanael natanael.l at gmail.com
Thu Dec 19 05:59:26 EST 2013


That makes me curious - can NSA control all these Xbox One's and their
Kinects? Because those things have fairly good microphones. As well as
the Wii's, their controllers have microphones built in too. And then
there's the SmartTV:s. And then there's also the old stories about how
some phones can get their microphones triggered remotely via the
baseband exploits.

Hardware switches for all input devices, anyone?

Fortunately the attack is currently only plausible for devices that
perform cryptographic operations all day with the same set of keys, so
it "only" really applies to servers rather than most home electronics.

On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 4:36 PM, Nathan of Guardian
<nathan at guardianproject.info> wrote:
>
> >From GnuPG:
> http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-devel/2013-December/028102.html
>
> "The second attack is more serious.  It is an adaptive chosen ciphertext
> attack to reveal the private key.  A possible scenario is that the
> attacker places a sensor (for example a standard smartphone) in the
> vicinity of the targeted machine.  That machine is assumed to do
> unattended RSA decryption of received mails, for example by using a mail
> client which speeds up browsing by opportunistically decrypting mails
> expected to be read soon.  While listening to the acoustic emanations of
> the targeted machine, the smartphone will send new encrypted messages to
> that machine and re-construct the private key bit by bit.  A 4096 bit
> RSA key used on a laptop can be revealed within an hour."
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