[guardian-dev] Smartphones: Acoustic Key Breakers

[Lee Azzarello]

Indeed the lab tests are interesting but the FAQ confirms the frequency
range and signal amplitude can be covered by "wide band noise". I have a
suspicion this would not work in a data center due to the high amplitude
noise emanations from various components of cooling equipment as well as
crosstalk from dense racks. I'll do a frequency analysis of one of my colo
centers next time I'm there. If that checks out most servers are out of the
target range. What's left?

-lee

On Thursday, December 19, 2013, Natanael wrote:

> 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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