Synchronization retrieval and image reconstruction of a video display unit exploiting its compromising emanations

A Quantitative Approach to Eavesdrop Video Display Systems Exploiting Multiple Electromagnetic Leakage Channels

“…1. These different transmission stages need to be considered when analyzing the leakage characteristics of the VDU because each stage has the potential to leak into the far-field and will have its own leakage characteristics [13], [14]. The video signal contains processed video data and video synchronization signals.…”

“…It also investigates the use of MIMO methods by deploying two directive antennas to increase the detected signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the quality of the reconstructed image. An SDR showed to be an effective tool to realize this, according to our previous research work [13] and the work of Lee et al [7], whereby SDRs are used to reconstruct the original video data from leaking emanations. However, the proposed method in this paper significantly improves the SNR of the reconstructed images and effectively exploits the various leakage channels originating from a multitude of identical VDUs.…”

“…The ability to acquire and analyze the emanations of all leakage sources forms an effective tool to determine the level of data security in the terms of compromising emanations and EMC/EMI. Some of the different video processing stages inside a VDU utilize different synchronization frequencies that do not interfere in the far-field [13], [14] when leaked. This in turn increases the risk of video data transmissions being compromised.…”

Electro-Magnetic Side-Channel Attack Through Learned Denoising and Classification

“…Compromising emanations are issued either by a VGA display, a DP-to-DVI cable or an HDMI connector. The interception system is depicted in Figure 1: the antenna is bilog, the SDR device automatically recovering parameters [8] is an Ettus X310 receiving with a 100 MHz bandwidth to recover the compromised information with a fine granularity [2]. The host computer running post-processing has a linux operating system, an Intel R Xeon R W-2125 Central Processing Unit (CPU) and an Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU.…”

“…It also opens up new post-processing opportunities that improve attack characteristics. De Meulemeester et al [8] leverage on SDR to enhance the performance of the attack and automatically find the structure of the captured data. When the intercepted emanation is originally 2D, retrieving the synchronization parameters of the targeted information system, the captured EM signal can be transformed from a vector to an image, reconstructing the 2-dimensional sensitive visual information.…”