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Wireless Security By The Gallon

Posted by timothy on from the just-a-little-lead-ma'am dept.

prostoalex writes "The next effort to improve wireless security might involve a trip to Home Depot. Force Field Wireless sells buckets of aluminum and copped-laced paint designed to prevent the 802.11 packets from escaping the building, Information Week reports. The article also talks about the Firce Field's pitch to the government in order to improve the homeland security, but the only governments that got interested in anti-Wi-Fi paint were from the Middle East. According to the products page, they also sell the brush sets." Easier than wallpaper, or moving into an old house.

1 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Boy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    TEMPEST is the codename for a pseudo-mythical method of surveillance used to intercept data from electrical devices, such as your computer, by intercepting unintended EM emanations. To quote:

    "TEMPEST was "invented" in 1918 when Herbert Yardley and his staff of the Black Chamber were engaged by the U.S. Army to develop methods to detect, intercept, and exploit combat telephones and covert radio transmitters. The initial research identified that "normal unmodified equipment" was allowing classified information to be passed to the enemy through a variety of technical weaknesses. A classified program was then created to develop methods to suppress these "compromising emanations". However, the actual acronym known as TEMPEST was only coined in the late 60's and early 70's (and is now considered an obsolete term, which has since, been replaced by the phrase "Emissions Security" or EMSEC).

    TEMPEST and it's associated disciplines involve designing circuits to minimize the amount of "compromising emanations" and to apply appropriate shielding, grounding, and bonding. These disciplines also include methods of radiation screening, alarms, isolation circuits/devices, and similar areas of equipment engineering.

    TEMPEST disciplines typically involve eliminating or reducing the transients caused by a communication signal and the resulting harmonics. These signals and their harmonics could allow the original signal to be reconstructed and analyzed."

    Link:
    http://www.tscm.com/TSCM101tempest.html

    The idea is that EM fields generated my, say, your monitor can be intercepted and used to reconstruct what's being displayed on the screen.