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Breaking RSA Keys by Listening to Your Computer

Posted by Hemos on from the sssh-i'm-hunting-for-wabbits dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Adi Shamir and crew gave a talk on preliminary results in extracting a private RSA key just by listening to the computer!. Similar to power analysis and LED leakage, this is a non-invasive, side channel attack that may have applications to tamper-resistant systems. It appears to be related to noisy capacitors on the motherboard, an effect which has been observed when CPU power saving is enabled on laptops."

3 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. This just in ..... by methangel · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    In Soviet Russia, the computer listens to YOU, in an eternal quest to find information on how to become a unified legion of machines that will rule the earth.

    I'm not kidding.

  2. thats GOOD! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    The world would be better if machines ruled it.

    Machines aren't racist, nor greedy, nor power-hungry, nor subject to many other human shortcommings. Therefore, they could make effecient decisions that serve both the greater good and the good of the individual better than any human could hope to.

    (provided, of course, that AI technology eventually advances to the point where computers are capeable of the sort of analysis necessary in order to make governmental decisions).

    My favorite application of computer-management would be automatic traffic routing. A little nav bouy could be erected at every street intersection, monitoring traffic throughput and reporting it to a central server. Each human just gets into his car, picks out his destination on MapQuest, and the car selects the fastest route based on traffic conditions. This would not only get each individual there in the shortest amount of time, but it would implicitly load-balance all human traffic in real time.....serving both the greater and the individual good.

    The possibilites are endles.....

  3. Re:Encryption is part of checks and balances. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Indeed. But it is extremely easy to kill someone with a screwdriver, easier than with most knives, in fact. If you are an average healthy adult male human, you can drive a flat head screwdriver straight through the sternum of another healthy adult male, and that's not even the easy way to kill someone with a screwdriver (neck or eye being the easiest - through the neck is easy but boringh- for psycho points, straight through the eyeball, into the brain, and wiggle it around...).