13 Aug
2006
13 Aug
'06
1:03 a.m.
Hi,
Scott Quinn said:
You can buy clock-chip oscillator modules with a built-in random jitter
to make this sort of interception more difficult. I came across them
in a catalog a while back. ISTR a note saying they were not available
in the US :-) You can buy motherboards with this feature too.
The monitor is the easiest device to read remotely, I saw a demo on
tv a few years back. Of course networking, especially wireless, has
made snooping much easier.
--
Cheers,
Stan Barr stanb at dial.pipex.com
The future was never like this!
Supposedly, non-clocked logic can also offer
greater security because
there's no clock signal for remote sensors to key on when trying to
sense what the CPU is doing. This seemed a little odd to me. Do
espionage types really try to sense what a processor is doing
remotely, based on the EM emissions from the chip?
Don't know about processors, but Tempest had a proof of concept for intercepting I/O
from kbd/video.
(Anyone else remember Tempest? for a while they were selling big "tinfoil hat"
type shields for monitors and then, suddenly,
it went away.) Was that NSA that came up with the POC?