Slashdot Mirror
Stealing Data Via Electrical Outlet
Ponca City, We love you writes "NetworkWorld reports that security consultants Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco are preparing to unveil their methodology at the Black Hat USA conference for stealing information typed on a computer keyboard using nothing more than the power outlet to which the computer is connected. When you type on a standard computer keyboard, electrical signals run through the cable to the PC. Those cables aren't shielded, so the signal leaks via the ground wire in the cable and into the ground wire on the computer's power supply. The attacker connects a probe to a nearby power socket, detects the ground leakage, and converts the signal back into alphanumeric characters. So far, the attack has proven successful using outlets up to about 15 meters away. The cost of the equipment to carry out the power-line attack could be as little as $500 and while the researchers admit their hacking tools are rudimentary, they believe they could be improved upon with a little time, effort and backing. 'If our small research was able to accomplish acceptable results in a brief development time (approximately a week of work) and with cheap hardware,' they say, 'Consider what a dedicated team or government agency can accomplish with more expensive equipment and effort.'"
what about usb keyboards? those wires are shielded. the compared the signal to a mouse signal so I'm assuming they're talking about ps2. still interesting(alarming) surveillance technology nonetheless
even usb uses a GND and the D+/D- (data wires) aren't isolated from the GND.
Plus most GND is typically a common ground (through the chassis and to the ground of the power cable).
and if you consider the fact that this was done by unfunded, tiny group in just a week....makes ya wonder what the NSA or any other BIGGER and better funded group would have up their sleeves.
looks like I have to come up with a random noise generator to hook up to the ground of my power outlets.
Root is like crack. Don't smoke it. I did once and got hooked. I ran Mac OS Updates as root. ****, I even had sex with my girlfriend as root. Man, that caused some permissions problems. When I started the road to recovery (logging in as Zacks) my girlfriend was all like: "**** no! You can't get any cause you don't own me an I don't go groups. You don't have the power to read, write OR execute so get out of my FACE" So I was all HELL NO bitch. And she wuz like you do not have root (superuser) privlages so get out of my TruBlueEnvironment! So then I went chown and chmodded her ass to me. Dat be-otch be up in my hizzouse. What what. Holla!
The SIGINT in the Netherlands did this kind of stuff well before the new millennium, including reading the screen (LCD or CRT) and audio by tapping into the ground or pointing a dish to the emitting circuit, one of the reasons why the whole building handling sensitive information must be encased, making it practically a faraday cage. Only disadvantage is that your cellphone doesn't work although the SIGINT saw that as an advantage.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST - the fact that these guidelines exist, means that this is in not new.
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
If the cops or feds really want to spy on you, you will have a hard time preventing it. My advice is not to attract their attention in the first place.
If you're someone like the mafia, you can't use electronic devices and you can't write anything down. Each of your clandestine conversations has to be in a different noisy location so they can't set up a directional microphone or bug. You also have to prevent them from getting a deaf person to lip read you. (I don't have direct experience with criminal gangs but anyone can observe that they usually aren't brought down by wiretaps. The big prosecutions of mafia bosses usually resulted from getting an underling to rat on his boss.) The point is that anyone worried about being spied on can and will take measures to prevent it.
Spying on someone is expensive. Spying on someone's key clicks is particularly expensive and probably won't produce great results. Someone tried an experiment of bugging an office by shining a laser on the window. The results were disappointing. The vast majority of the conversation was uninteresting. The experimenters decided that no useful information would have been gathered.
Tapping telephones and data links is relatively easy (compared with sniffing keystrokes). Stealing someone's laptop is usually also easy. Unless I'm taking measures against those kinds of spying, I'm not worried about having my keystrokes sniffed. If I were at danger of being spied on, I would be much more worried about being betrayed by a 'friend', associate, or employee.
Securing notebooks is of course much easier than securing PCs because the keyboard data doesn't go outside the system. The intro to the article appears confused. Any signal on the earth line has to be due to capacitative coupling between a keyboard and external ground owing to the well known law that the sum of all the currents in all circuit paths to any junction must be zero. If you want to improve security against ground line signalling when using a notebook, run it on battery using secured wireless networking, and use the built in keyboard and monitor.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I worked in a facility that was fully TEMPEST shielded in the 80's. Dual airlock doors with full metal seals to get in. The power line leakage problem was taken care of a motor/generator setup. Incoming power only went to an electic motor. The motor was connected by a shaft which spun a generator to supply power to the computer room. With only a mechanical connection no data would be leaking back.
So that's basically a mechanically implemented low-pass filter, right? I would think that it would be easier and cheaper to implement electronic low-pass filters at each wall outlet. Especially if you're worried about someone plugging a sniffer into one of the facility's interior power outlets.
I've read both Slashdot articles. They look similar to me. The older one is far superior.
Basically, if you have a keyboard of poor quality that has poor shielding and no noise reduction components, it is possible to read signals. The question is, which keyboards and computers are poorly designed and poorly shielded?
Read the complete story: This PDF, not referenced by Slashdot, tells the whole story: CanSecWest/core09 March 16-20, 2009 (PDF). Quote from page 41: "This doesn't work against USB keyboards because of differential signaling". Also, on page 12: "The [PS/2 keyboard] wires are very close to each other and poorly shielded".
Slashdot articles of especially poor quality: Are they paid advertisements? I've read Slashdot articles for years, and there is now a new phenomenon. A publication runs an article of very poor quality and Slashdot links to it, possibly to lead Slashdot readers to the publication so that they will read the ads. This article was submitted to Slashdot by a professional writer, Hugh Pickens, who is possibly acting as a public relations agent. He has written at least 413 Slashdot articles. Does someone at Slashdot accept money to publish his articles?
Quote from the OLDER article referenced by the OLDER Slashdot story:
'March 12, 2009, 02:46 PM - IDG News Service -
'Inverse Path researchers Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco say they get accurate results, picking out keyboard signals from keyboard ground cables.
'Their work only applies to older, PS/2 keyboards [PS/2 connector, not PlayStation], but the data they get is "pretty good," they say. On these keyboards, "the data cable is so close to the ground cable, the emanations from the data cable leak onto the ground cable, which acts as an antenna," Barisani said.
'That ground wire passes through the PC and into the building's power wires, where the researchers can pick up the signals using a computer, an oscilloscope and about $500 worth of other equipment. They believe they could pick up signals from a distance of up to 50 meters by simply plugging a keystroke-sniffing device into the power grid somewhere close to the PC they want to snoop on.
'Because PS/2 keyboards emanate radiation at a standard, very specific frequency, the researchers can pick up a keyboard's signal even on a crowded power grid. They tried out their experiment at a local university's physics department, and even with particle detectors, oscilloscopes and other computers on the network were still able to get good data.'