Optical Tempest FAQ

Tyler Durden camera_lumina at hotmail.com
Fri Dec 3 08:50:35 PST 2004


Well, the first one's a little "Hey this is scary give us some grant 
money"-ish. This has zero impact on real-world telecom systems in terms of 
detecting actual payloads BUT detecting some of the management channel info 
(via the external DS1 management channel) could actually matter in some 
cases.

I'm still waiting for someone to put a trojan into the telecom control 
channels causing them to randomly reprovision themselves. That could have an 
impact that far exceeds mere PR...

-TD

>From: Chris Kuethe <chris.kuethe at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: Chris Kuethe <chris.kuethe at gmail.com>
>To: die at dieconsulting.com
>CC: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina at hotmail.com>, sunder at sunder.net, 
>cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net
>Subject: Re: Optical Tempest FAQ
>Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 23:39:33 -0700
>
>On Fri, 3 Dec 2004 01:01:57 -0500, Dave Emery <die at dieconsulting.com> 
>wrote:
> > ...
> >         In fact the greater hazard may sometimes be from red, yellow or
> > green LEDs on the front of equipment that are directly driven with
> > real data in order to allow troubleshooting - recovering data from one
> > of those at a distance using a good telescope may be possible and most
> > people don't think of the gentle flicker of the LED as carrying actual
> > information that could be intercepted.
>
>Like this classic. Was just as much fun to reread as it was the first time. 
>:)
>
>http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:YdHPMAbPMeAJ:www.applied-math.org/optical_tempest.pdf+black+tape+over+modem+lights+tempest&hl=en&client=firefox
>http://www.applied-math.org/optical_tempest.pdf
>
>--
>GDB has a 'break' feature; why doesn't it have 'fix' too?





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