Electromagnetic radiation revisited

Highland, Harold Joseph

doi:10.1016/0167-4048(86)90125-2

Cited by 29 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…According to Highland, the security risks associated with electromagnetic radiation have been known in the military and intelligence communities since 1967 [16], and have received more widespread attention in 1985, when van Eck demonstrated that the screen content of a display could be effectively reconstructed at a distance using cheap and readily available equipment [44]. More recently, Kuhn and Anderson described a number of simple eavesdropping experiments performed with a TEMPEST receiver and a cheap AM radio.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 98%

ClearShot: Eavesdropping on Keyboard Input from Video

Balzarotti

Cova

Vigna

2008

2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Sp 2008)

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Eavesdropping on electronic communication is usually prevented by using cryptography-based mechanisms. However, these mechanisms do not prevent one from obtaining private information through side channels, such as the electromagnetic emissions of monitors or the sound produced by keyboards. While extracting the same information by watching somebody typing on a keyboard might seem to be an easy task, it becomes extremely challenging if it has to be automated. However, an automated tool is needed in the case of long-lasting surveillance procedures or long user activity, as a human being is able to reconstruct only a few characters per minute. This paper presents a novel approach to automatically recovering the text being typed on a keyboard, based solely on a video of the user typing. As part of the approach, we developed a number of novel techniques for motion tracking, sentence reconstruction, and error correction. The approach has been implemented in a tool, called ClearShot, which has been tested in a number of realistic settings where it was able to reconstruct a substantial part of the typed information.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 98%

ClearShot: Eavesdropping on Keyboard Input from Video

Balzarotti

Cova

Vigna

2008

2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Sp 2008)

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“…Considering the excitement that van Eck's findings created [9,16,17,18], and the enormous investment in shielding by the diplomatic and defence community, it is surprising that practically no further research on Tempest attack and defence has appeared in the open literature. However, an RF lab is expensive, while purely theoretical contributions are difficult due to the lack of published data about the information-carrying emanations of modern hardware.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Electromagnetic radiation as a computer security risk was mentioned in the open literature as early as 1967 [9]. One of the first more detailed public descriptions of the Tempest threat appears to have been a 1983 report in Swedish [10], but the problem was brought to general attention by a 1985 paper [11] in which van Eck demonstrated that the screen content of a video display unit could be reconstructed at a distance using low-cost home built equipment-a TV set whose sync pulse generators were replaced by manually controlled oscillators.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Soft Tempest: Hidden Data Transmission Using Electromagnetic Emanations

Kühn

Anderson

1998

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

221

113

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Abstract.It is well known that eavesdroppers can reconstruct video screen content from radio frequency emanations. We discuss techniques that enable the software on a computer to control the electromagnetic radiation it transmits. This can be used for both attack and defence. To attack a system, malicious code can encode stolen information in the machine's RF emissions and optimise them for some combination of reception range, receiver cost and covertness. To defend a system, a trusted screen driver can display sensitive information using fonts which minimise the energy of these emissions. There is also an interesting potential application to software copyright protection.

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“…Probably the earliest of these ideas is embodied in the work of van Eck [41] and Highland [16] on compromising signals from electromagnetic radiation. That work was later extended by Kuhn and Kuhn [21], wherein it was argued that a telescope could be used to spy on reflections of a computer screen from afar.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing double

Heinly

White

et al. 2013

Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer &Amp; Communications Security - CCS '13

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Of late, threats enabled by the ubiquitous use of mobile devices have drawn much interest from the research community. However, prior threats all suffer from a similar, and profound, weaknessnamely the requirement that the adversary is either within visual range of the victim (e.g., to ensure that the pop-out events in reflections in the victim's sunglasses can be discerned) or is close enough to the target to avoid the use of expensive telescopes. In this paper, we broaden the scope of the attacks by relaxing these requirements and show that breaches of privacy are possible even when the adversary is around a corner. The approach we take overcomes challenges posed by low image resolution by extending computer vision methods to operate on small, high-noise, images. Moreover, our work is applicable to all types of keyboards because of a novel application of fingertip motion analysis for key-press detection. In doing so, we are also able to exploit reflections in the eyeball of the user or even repeated reflections (i.e., a reflection of a reflection of the mobile device in the eyeball of the user). Our empirical results show that we can perform these attacks with high accuracy, and can do so in scenarios that aptly demonstrate the realism of this threat.

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Electromagnetic radiation revisited

Cited by 29 publications

References 0 publications

ClearShot: Eavesdropping on Keyboard Input from Video

ClearShot: Eavesdropping on Keyboard Input from Video

Soft Tempest: Hidden Data Transmission Using Electromagnetic Emanations

Seeing double

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