Slashdot Mirror
LED Lights: Friend or Foe?
elfdump writes: "In an article (pdf) soon
to be published in ACM Transactions
on Information and Systems Security, security researchers have discovered
that data transmitted through modems and routers can be remotely reconstructed
from the equipment's LED status indicators. According to experiments, their
light-to-information retrieval method is successful even when the light is
captured 'at a considerable distance' from the source. If you want to prevent
people from spying on your data, you may want to tape up those blinking LEDs!"
The lights on my switch indicate activity, they don't flicker to the beat of my bits. Even if they did, there'd probably be too much static and other interference on them to reliably deduce data from them. On hubs it's even worse. You get all traffic flowing through all ports in both directions, try deciphering that! This story is, as far as I'm concerned, major bull and it's not even April 1st yet!
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
I avoid the kind of people foolish enough to use internal modems.
Why would you want there to be no way whatsoever of knowing if your machine is online or not? I like being able to look over and see:
1. If the modem is off hook.
2. If there is data traffic.
Internal modems are a bad idea. There's no such thing as an external 'Win modem' for example. And I can move my US Robotics Courier to any type of machine I choose.