Acoustic Cryptanalysis

[John Young]

http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/

Acoustic Cryptanalysis: On nosy people and noisy machines

Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer

A powerful method for extracting information from supposedly 
secure systems is side-channel attacks, i.e., cryptanalytic 
techniques that rely on information unintentionally leaked by 
computing devices. Most attention has been focused on 
electromagnetic emanations, power consumption and, recently, 
diffuse visible light from CRT displays. The oldest eavesdropping 
channel, namely acoustic emanations, has received little attention. 
The following demonstrates some preliminary results in the analysis 
of acoustic emanations from personal computers, showing them to 
be a surprisingly rich source of information on CPU activity.

May 7, 2004