July 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Use of smart cards for wi-fi user ident (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

http://www.idg.net/ic_1326548_9720_1-5072.html -- ____________________________________________________________________ We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" ravage(a)ssz.com jchoate(a)open-forge.org www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org --------------------------------------------------------------------

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De-shredding the shreds
by Thomas Shaddack 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

Summary: Technology allows taking the "noodles" of shredded document, scanning them, and reconstructing the pages with various degrees of manual and automated effort. New approaches are necessary for high-security operations. Source: New York Times Author: Douglas Heingartner Title: Picking up the pieces URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/17/technology/circuits/17shre.html Highlight: Mr. Brassil's project at Hewlett Packard, aimed at tracing the source of shredded document by the micromarks on the shreds, both of vanilla shredders and by custom-modifying the shredders to leave a defined signature on the strips. http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2002/HPL-2002-215.html (abstract) http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2002/HPL-2002-215.pdf Full text: Picking Up the Pieces By DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER BERLIN -- THROUGHOUT the 1980's, Sascha Anderson, a poet, musician and literary impresario, was one of the leading voices to speak out against the East German government and its dreaded secret police, the Stasi. But his credibility gradually evaporated after the Communist government's collapse as rumors about him acquired the weight of proof: he had been informing on his dissident compatriots all along. He had been told that his Stasi file had been destroyed. In fact, it was manually reconstructed from some of the millions of shreds of paper that panicked Stasi officials threw into garbage bags during the regime's final days in the fall of 1989. Now, if all goes as planned by the German government, the remaining contents of those 16,000 bags will also be reconstructed. Advanced scanning technology makes it possible to reconstruct documents previously thought safe from prying eyes, sometimes even pages that have been ripped into confetti-size pieces. And although a great deal of sensitive information is stored digitally these days, recent corporate scandals have shown that the paper shredder is still very much in use. "People perceive it as an almost perfect device," said Jack Brassil, a researcher for Hewlett-Packard who has worked on making shredded documents traceable. If people put a document through a shredder, "they assume that it's fundamentally unrecoverable," he said. "And that's clearly not true." In its crudest form, the art of reconstructing shredded documents has been around for as long as shredders have. After the takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran in 1979, Iranian captors laid pieces of documents on the floor, numbered each one and enlisted local carpet weavers to reconstruct them by hand, said Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. "For a culture that's been tying 400 knots per inch for centuries, it wasn't that much of a challenge," he said. The reassembled documents were sold on the streets of Tehran for years. That episode helped convince the United States government to update its procedures for destroying documents. The expanded battery of techniques now includes pulping, pulverizing and chemically decomposing sensitive data. Yet these more complex methods are not always at hand in an emergency, which is why the vagaries of de-shredding will be of interest to intelligence officials for some time to come. "It's been an area of interest for a very long time," said William Daly, a former F.B.I. investigator who is a vice president at Control Risks Group, a security consulting firm. "The government is always trying to keep ahead of the curve." Like computer encryption and hacking, "it's kind of a cat-and-mouse game, keeping one step ahead," he said. "That's why the government is always looking at techniques to help them ensure their documents are destroyed properly." Modern image-processing technology has made the rebuilding job a lot easier. A Houston-based company, ChurchStreet Technology, already offers a reconstruction service for documents that have been conventionally strip-shredded into thin segments. The company's founder, Cody Ford, says that reports of document shredding in recent corporate scandals alerted him to a gap in the market. "Within three months of the Enron collapse at end of 2001, we had a service out to electronically reconstruct strip shreds," he said. The Stasi archives are a useful reference point for researchers tackling the challenge, though perhaps more for the scale than the sophistication of the shredding. Most of the Stasi papers were torn by hand because the flimsy East German shredding machines collapsed under the workload. The hastily stored bags of ripped paper were quickly discovered and confiscated. In 1995 the German government commissioned a team in the Bavarian town of Zirndorf to reassemble the torn Stasi files one by one. Yet by 2001, the three dozen archivists had gone through only about 300 bags, so officials began a search for another way to piece together the remaining 33 million pages a bit faster. Four companies remain candidates for the job, including Fraunhofer IPK of Berlin, part of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft research institute, which helped develop the MP3 music format. The institute is drafting plans to sort, scan and archive the millions of pages within five years, drawing on expertise in office automation, image processing, biometrics and handwriting analysis as well as sophisticated software. "It's more than just the algorithms about the puzzles," said Bertram Nickolay, the head of the security and testing technologies department. Indeed, the archive is a massive grab bag of randomly torn documents, many with handwritten and typewritten text on the same page. Combining all these technologies in a project of this scope "is on the borders of what's possible," Mr. Nickolay said. His system's accuracy rate is about 80 percent. "It will take time for the algorithms to be optimized," Mr. Nickolay said, noting that handwriting analysis began with accuracy levels of around 50 percent, and are now at 90 percent and above. Some of the companies competing for the job concentrated on the shape, color and perforations of the shreds, while other contenders opted for semantically driven systems, which looked for keywords and likely text matches. The Fraunhofer plan is to combine its smart scanning software with the know-how of the Zirndorf archivists, who have amassed years of experience working with these tiny pieces of history. After all the shreds have been scanned (at 200 dots per inch), the interactive software will suggest possible matches, which an operator can accept or reject. While Fraunhofer IPK eventually plans to use a similar technique, several companies say they can do so already. ChurchStreet's software analyzes the graphical patterns that go to the edge of each piece. First, workers paste the random shreds onto standard sheets of paper, which takes three to seven minutes per page. The pages are scanned, and software analyzes the shreds for possible matches. Mr. Ford, the company founder, said the ChurchStreet service can recover up to 70 percent of a document's content, although he stressed that the goal was to get blocks of information rather than to re-create the original formatting. The blocks are presented to the client, who determines where they might belong in the overall scheme. "We don't make any guesswork about reconstruction," Mr. Ford said. "We make no assumptions." ChurchStreet, whose clients are mainly law agencies and private law firms, charges roughly $2,000 to reconstruct a cubic foot of strip-shreds. A cubic foot of shreds is generally less than 100 pages. Mr. Ford said ChurchStreet would soon offer a service to reconstruct cross-shredded documents - that is, those cut in two directions - for $8,000 to $10,000 per cubic foot. A common standard in cross-shredding is particles one thirty-second by seven-sixteenths of an inch, which results in thousands of grain-like shreds per page. Cross-shredding makes the job a lot trickier, but not for lack of processing power. "The problem is not whether it's possible with the software, which is possible," said Werner Vvgeli, the managing director of the German office of SER Solutions, a company in Dulles, Va., that also competed for the contract to reconstruct the Stasi documents. "The problem is how to scan these documents." Fred Cohen, a security consultant who reconstructed many pages while working at Sandia National Laboratories, also sees limits. "When you get down to very small shreds, then the numbers start to eat you," he said. "You start to get to where there isn't enough text per shred to be of any use. You've got a completely black shred; whether it's the middle of the cross of a t or the dot of an i, you can't tell." Adding to the challenge, the smaller the pieces are, the farther apart they can fall, and thus the less likely they are to cluster in a conveniently retrievable form. Security experts also say that using large type (for less text per shred), and feeding the paper into a shredder perpendicular to the direction of the text (so no complete phrases stay together) makes shredding less vulnerable. Professional document reconstructions are generally recognized by the courts in much the way that fingerprint or handwriting evidence is. An expert may not be able to vouch for the accuracy of the information on a given page, said Mr. Daly, the former F.B.I. investigator, but he can testify that a reconstructed document "was at one time one piece of paper that was cut into little pieces of paper, and now it's back into one piece of paper." Mr. Daly added that investigators often use reassembled pages as part of a larger forensic puzzle. "Once we have a hard-copy document, we can then go back and look at databases and put in search criteria, and to be able to actually come up with the original electronic version," he said. "One becomes a pathway to the other." The demand for such investigative services is clear. "I probably get a call every month," said Robert Johnson of the National Association for Information Destruction, an American trade group, from clients looking for "a way to reverse the process." Other projects, like Mr. Brassil's at Hewlett-Packard, focus on designing a shredder that leaves telltale traces on the documents it destroys, allowing them to be pinpointed later. In Germany, meanwhile, a decision about whether to proceed with the reconstruction of Stasi documents is not expected before September. Mr. Vvgeli of SER Solutions, whose firm withdrew from bidding for the project, said he doubted that financing would materialize. "These documents contain lots of information that might be dangerous to a few politicians who are still active, still in power," he said. "So there's no political majority for any such investment." Sascha Anderson, the dissident discredited by the files, is among those who hope the project goes forward. "Of course I would have preferred that they weren't found," he said by phone from Frankfurt. "But I realize that it's a unique chance for a society to have access to this information." And since he was exposed, he said, he has been able to sleep better: "I've ultimately been freed of my burden by history."

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Optical Tempest? I have my doubts...
by Tyler Durden 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

I dunno...I'm thinking that optical tempest is probably bullshit 99% of the time, but what do I know? My Optical specialities are ultrafast and optical networking. But I still don't believe that specular reflection of smallish type from a monitor will have anything that is recoverable. Of course, this is going to be dependent on the quality of the wall material, but for most not-so-even plaster/drywall painted surfaces, I just can't believe the appopriate spacial frequencies of the image are not scattered after that kind of reflection. The conspiracy theorist is telling me there's some reason they floated the optical tempest story, though I can't quite figure out what that reason is... -TD >From: Peter Fairbrother <zenadsl6186(a)zen.co.uk> >To: <cypherpunks(a)lne.com> >Subject: Re: Security for Mafiosos and Freedom Fighters >Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 12:12:12 +0100 > >Bill Frantz wrote: > > > Ever since I heard that manufacturers were cleaning assembled boards >with > > soap and water I have wondered just how much you need to protect >electronic > > circuits from water. You obviously don't want to allow them to stay >damp > > so they corrode, but immersion for a time (up to weeks) followed by a >fresh > > water rinse and drying might not be so bad. Do any hardware experts >have > > an opinion? > >A long time ago I used to teach an "intro to computing" class. many >students >were older people who were afraid to physically touch a keyboard - partly >just because it was unfamiliar, because it meant they were actually, now, >starting on the road to learning, because they feared to "break something", >or because they thought they might get a shock (I kid you not). I digress. > >One way of making them feel more comfortable was to "accidently" spill a >drink on a keyboard, than immerse it in a sink, rinse, and hang out to dry. >Sometimes I used a hairdrier to reuse the keyboard during the lesson, but >mostly I just left it overnight to dry. That gave some at least of them >some >confidence that it was ok to touch the keyboard. > >I've also washed an iMac (which had fallen in the sea) by immersion in tap >water and careful drying, the CD needed more care (drying with IPA), I took >out the hard drive first and was careful with that, also cleaned all >connectors with solvent cleaner, but it worked ok afterwards. > ><peeve> >BTW, do NOT do this with crappy Apple keyboards! They are membrane-based >and >will be destroyed. They are also hard to open for repair, and when I asked >an Apple chap about them he said "You should never drink near a keyboard". >What crap! ></peeve> > >I give no guarantee that it won't destroy your keyboard, but it won't hurt >most keyboards. > >-- >Peter Fairbrother > > >BTW, m-o-o-t uses a randomised virtual keyboard with TEMPEST (both EM and >optical) resistant fonts. It's okay for inputting keys, but it's a hassle >for inputting text. > >Which means that your keys might be safe from keyloggers (both hardware and >software), but your plaintext isn't. Sigh. I'm trying to improve it by >putting the "senhorita" letters in one block and the rest elsewhere (not >for >key input obviously), and you do learn where the keys are after a while, >but >it's still a hassle. _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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1st amend: fiction != reality, words not kiddy pr0n
by Major Variola (ret.) 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

Appeals Court Dismisses Ohio Man's Guilty Plea in Obscenity Case Involving Fictitious Stories COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - A state appeals court on Thursday dismissed the guilty plea of a man imprisoned for writing fictitious stories of child torture and molestation. Lawyers specializing in the First Amendment believe Brian Dalton was the first person in the United States successfully prosecuted for child pornography that involved fictional writings, not images. The 10th Ohio District Court of Appeals in Columbus ruled that Dalton received ineffective legal assistance. Dalton had argued that his former lawyer didn't inform him of the legal implications of a guilty plea or ask for an immediate dismissal on First Amendment grounds. The 3-0 ruling sends the case back to Franklin County Common Pleas Court. Dalton could still be tried but prosecutors have not said whether they would seek to do so. Ray Vasvari, the American Civil Liberties Union's state legal director in Cleveland, called the decision an "important recognition for not only freedom of speech but freedom of thought." Dalton, 24, of Columbus, pleaded guilty in July 2001 to pandering obscenity involving a minor, which falls under Ohio's pornography law. He later asked to withdraw the plea so he could challenge the constitutionality of the law, but Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Nodine Miller refused. ACLU attorneys then appealed. Miller had sentenced Dalton to seven years, plus 4 1/2 years from a 1998 child pornography conviction on the grounds he violated probation by possessing the journal. The 14-page journal contained stories about three children - ages 10 and 11 - being caged in a basement, molested and tortured. Prosecutors acknowledged the stories were pure fiction. The journal was found by Dalton's probation officer during a routine search of his home. Dalton was charged under Ohio's 1989 child porn law, which bans possession of obscene material involving children. He was not charged under Ohio's obscenity law, which requires dissemination and not just possession. The appeals court found that Dalton's defense attorney, Isabella Dixon, misunderstood the two charges against her client. Both charges were based on the journal and involved fictitious events, the court found. Dixon, it said, had erroneously believed one of the charges was based on a letter Dalton wrote describing sexual molestation of a young cousin, a real person. "This misunderstanding was significant because of the important differences in the constitutional protections afforded the private possession of pornographic depictions of real children and similar depictions of fictional children," Judge William Klatt said, writing for the majority. A message was left with Dixon seeking comment. http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAQA2U49ID.html

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RE: Optical Tempest? I have my doubts...
by Trei, Peter 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

> Durden[SMTP:camera_lumina@hotmail.com] wrote: > > I dunno...I'm thinking that optical tempest is probably bullshit 99% of > the > time, but what do I know? My Optical specialities are ultrafast and > optical > networking. > > But I still don't believe that specular reflection of smallish type from a > > monitor will have anything that is recoverable. Of course, this is going > to > be dependent on the quality of the wall material, but for most not-so-even > > plaster/drywall painted surfaces, I just can't believe the appopriate > spacial frequencies of the image are not scattered after that kind of > reflection. > > The conspiracy theorist is telling me there's some reason they floated the > > optical tempest story, though I can't quite figure out what that reason > is... > > -TD > > > > > >BTW, m-o-o-t uses a randomised virtual keyboard with TEMPEST (both EM and > >optical) resistant fonts. It's okay for inputting keys, but it's a hassle > >for inputting text. > > > >Which means that your keys might be safe from keyloggers (both hardware > and > >software), but your plaintext isn't. Sigh. I'm trying to improve it by > >putting the "senhorita" letters in one block and the rest elsewhere (not > >for > >key input obviously), and you do learn where the keys are after a while, > >but > >it's still a hassle. > Please don't top-post. Optical TEMPEST of the type we've been discussing has nothing to do with specular reflection. As your CRT screen is raster-scanned, the point at which the electron beam is pointing at any given moment is much brighter than the rest of the screen. That the screen seems uniformly illuminated is a result of your persistance of vision. Optical tempest records the brightness of the light reflecting off the wall behind the user as a function of time. This can be used to reconstruct the brightness of each pixel on the screen, since they are refreshed sequentially in raster order. Peter Trei

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Re: Optical Tempest? I have my doubts...
by Major Variola (ret) 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

At 03:15 PM 7/17/03 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: >I dunno...I'm thinking that optical tempest is probably bullshit 99% of the >time, but what do I know? There was an article on optical tempest based on reading modem-LEDs, which are sometimes modulated with the data stream. For Mhz rates it works. >But I still don't believe that specular reflection of smallish type from a >monitor will have anything that is recoverable. Of course, this is going to >be dependent on the quality of the wall material, but for most not-so-even >plaster/drywall painted surfaces, I just can't believe the appopriate >spacial frequencies of the image are not scattered after that kind of >reflection. The idea of reading the *matte* reflection of the CRT beam is possible. But its not *spatial* frequency, its using intensity vs. time. At any one instant you have a single 1-D measurement. This exploits the fact, as stated, that the phosphor is brightest under the (scanning) beam. There is no spatial info present. You simply need a sensitive (contrast is low) and fast (raster rate) optical measurement. >The conspiracy theorist is telling me there's some reason they floated the >optical tempest story, though I can't quite figure out what that reason >is... Its the Windowshade division of the Anti-Illuminati ---- Irony: Jewish Zealots were famous for offing (Jewish) Roman collaborators. 100 generations later, Arabic Zealots whack (Arabic) ZionistCrusader collaborators. "Pro-American Mayor, Son Killed in Iraq" ---- Of course Iraq isn't another Vietnam. They don't know how to make good pho hoa.

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RE: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
by Sunder 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Trei, Peter wrote: > Lets not forget optical TEMPEST - remember a few months ago, > when it was demonstrated that the image on a CRT could > be reconstructed just from the light it reflected on walls? The > point where the electron beam is hitting the phosphors is > much brighter than the rest of the screen, and by syncing a > fast photodetector to monitor scan rates, you can reconstruct > the image on a screen in a distant room just by viewing the > backwash light through a telescope. Absolutely. Which is why people worried about security in this manner, should move to LCD's. Not just for weakening TEMPEST signals, but also for defeating optical TEMPEST... (and saving power.) However I have to say that from a purely user point of view, I like the way CRT's look much better than LCD's. CRT's tend to be richer and brighter than LCD's, and their refresh rates are much better... LCD's are still suceptible to TEMPEST monitoring, though there are far less emissions since there isn't this great big nuclear particle accelerator sitting infront of you :) (what? electrons are nuclear particles. :) But the signals from poorly shielded VGA cables can still be picked up (as can those of keyboards, and other hardware.) Other tricks include using more than one monitor (make sure they're all the same brand/model, attached to video cards that are identical and operating at the same resolution, depth, and refresh rate, and displaying random junk, etc. + using tempest fonts on the non-decoy system.) Better yet, use a notebook computer on battery power (so that power saving mode comes intoplay) with several decoys as they'd (generally) dump much less RF. You could also add some shielding, but it's unlikely to help very much... I actually played with a fox & hound kit one day. For those who never had to run ethernet (CAT 3,5,5e,etc.) or phone cable, this consists of a pair of tools: a tone injector that makes lots of noise, and a detector. The detector can pick up not just the signal from the tone injector, but also lovely things such as 60Hz hum, phone conversations (in analog phones anyhow), etc... You can also learn to "hear" the different sounds various things like 100BTx make and distinguish from - say, 10BT, or cable TV, etc... with a cheap proble that doesn't filter... I did find that when used on a keyboard, with some cheaper keyboards anyway, you can "hear" the keystrokes and the key scanning pattern, and that the individual keys are certainly distinctive enough - you could probably hook this thing up to a sound card and figure out which keys send what RF pattern... So with the right recorder/relay/decoder hidden under someone's desk, you could capture their keystrokes without disturbing epoxy or taking the keyboard apart. (As with all bugs, you'd need a power suply, some way to intercept the data, and either some way to record the data, or relay it. Relaying it, and hooking into existing power is better than just recording it or using a battery as a source, because you don't need a 2nd blag bag job to remove your bug and dump the data.) Of course if the bug transmits, it can be picked up in a sweep, but if the PC is on, the guy doing the sweep might not realize that there's a bug since the PC is a noise source... YMMV, etc. So all this talk of expoying keyboards down is somewhat naive in light of this. Not to say that if you, hypothetically speaking, were in a position to have a well funded, and determined set of enemies who were out to get your data, that using expoxy to glue down your keyboard wouldn't frustrate them, but rather to point out that there are other means and methods that would more than ruin your day. :) The path of least resistance, again, is not to attract the attention of such enemies in the first place. But hey, if your threat model is your kid sister or RIAA, then much less thought is perfectly fine. [As with all my posts, "you" is always a fictional character, and in this one, "you" switches from the guy trying to steal data to the guy trying to protect data, YMMV, #include <std_disclaimer.h> ]

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RE: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
by Trei, Peter 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

> ---------- > From: Tyler Durden[SMTP:camera_lumina@hotmail.com] > Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 9:38 PM > To: sunder(a)sunder.net > Cc: shaddack(a)ns.arachne.cz; timcmay(a)got.net; cypherpunks(a)minder.net > Subject: Re: Sealing wax & eKeyboard > > I don't think a virtual keyboard is necessarily a bad idea in this case. I > > live in a densely populated neighborhood in NYC. SOmeone is ALWAYS in my > home, and in the rare cases nobody's here we turn on our alarm. This does > not mean some visual surveillance of my keyboard is impossible, but it > greatly reduces the number of parties with the desire and resources to > attempt such a surveillance. And the reason this matters is because I can > download such a virtual keyboard for pennies (thus causing the need for > VERY > costly forms of surveillance by nullifying keystroke loggers), and cause > the > cost of surveillance to rise probably far more than exponentially. This is > a > good thing (from my point of view!) in and of itself, but imagine if a > large > number of people thought this way, encrypting even the most trivial of > communications. > > -TD > > Lets not forget optical TEMPEST - remember a few months ago, when it was demonstrated that the image on a CRT could be reconstructed just from the light it reflected on walls? The point where the electron beam is hitting the phosphors is much brighter than the rest of the screen, and by syncing a fast photodetector to monitor scan rates, you can reconstruct the image on a screen in a distant room just by viewing the backwash light through a telescope. Peter

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The Register - Congress threatens two hi-tech Gestapo programs (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31791.html -- ____________________________________________________________________ We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" ravage(a)ssz.com jchoate(a)open-forge.org www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
by Tyler Durden 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

"Anything displayed on your screen is visible to the guy across the street with a TEMPEST detector unless you work in a Faraday cage. " No, no you have the whole thing wrong. As May recently stated, "crypto is economics". It's one thing for "them" to set up a camera to look at some Arab guy's computer down on Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn. It's an entirely different thing if, by using a virtual keyboard, "they" have to do the same thing for millions of people. (And in case it's not obvious, the cost probably won' be in the hardware but in the installation costs, and the fact that the probability of detection of such efforts is nonzero, thus nullifying their "investment".) If I have a plan to smash a plane into the Empire State building, I'll probably work harder to hide it. If I'm sharing mp3's on Kazaa or whatever and I don't want to have RIAA make an example out of me, that virtual keyboard may be just right. The real danger of crypto and, I'd argue, a virtual keyboard in this case, is that by spending tiny fractions of money we can make it prohibitively costly for "them" to monitor a large number of transactions. Forget unbreakability. Forget Faraday cages (you don't have anything that important to hide anyway). Cheap, easy and scalable is the only way to bumrush this show. -TD >From: Sunder <sunder(a)sunder.net> >To: Thomas Shaddack <shaddack(a)ns.arachne.cz> >CC: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina(a)hotmail.com>, timcmay(a)got.net, >cypherpunks(a)minder.net >Subject: Re: Sealing wax & eKeyboard >Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 13:23:02 -0400 (edt) > >Geez! You guys have the DUMBEST ideas ever! For fuck's sake, go and >RTFA! (For the dumb: READ THE FUCKING ARCHIVES!) > >Anything displayed on your screen is visible to the guy across the street >with a TEMPEST detector unless you work in a Faraday cage. Failing that a >hidden pinhole camera, or an RF transmitter attached to your cable -- hell >these are available for hobbist use right now: x10.com has small devices >that you can use to broadcast video from one room to another. Getting the >same done for VGA, XVGA, etc. shouldn't be any harder. > >Using IR or RF is one of the stupidest things you could possibly >do. Think! IR and RF are detectable from a distance! > >Ok, some IR auth is ok, provided it's in a sealed chamber and no photons >leak out. i.e. think of a two cylinders, sealed at the ends where the >cables go, where one fits inside the other... sort of like fiber optic >cables and connectors. No leaks. > >Direct contact's obviously fine, so long as your alleged attacker can't >tap into it. > >----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- > + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of /|\ > \|/ :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\ ><--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech. \/|\/ > /|\ :Found to date: 0. Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD. \|/ > + v + : The look on Sadam's face - priceless! >--------_sunder_(a)_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------ > >On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Thomas Shaddack wrote: > > > However, this will work around the keyboard loggers, but will cause > > development of eg. programs saving the screenshots at the moment of a > > mouseclick. (Which is definitely more detectable - by storing bulk >amounts > > of data - than just a plain keylogger, disadvantaging the adversary > > somehow.) Also won't protect against ceiling cams, if they'd have enough > > resolution to see the screen clearly enough. > > > > Couldn't there be some challenge-response device, eg. over IrDA or radio > > waves or direct contact (eg, iButton DS1955B or DS1957B), which would be > > unlocked by something like a PIN code? How to avoid the leakage of the >PIN > > and subsequent seizure of the device then? _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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