Stealing Smartphone Crypto Keys Using Radio Waves

coondoggie writes "Encryption keys on smartphones can be stolen via a technique using radio waves, says one of the world's foremost crypto experts, Paul Kocher, whose firm Cryptography Research will demonstrate the hacking stunt with several types of smartphones at the upcoming RSA Conference in San Francisco next month."

Comments

Electromagnetic Where Exactly?

[GreenTech11]

TFA says that

The radio-based device will pick up electromagnetic waves occurring when the crypto libraries inside the smartphone are used,

, but I can't see how it could actually be detecting anything inside the smartphone as the waves emitted by the little electrons zipping around are hardly going to be detected, not to mention identifying those particular disturbances amongst everything else would be impossible. Is it actually detecting the stuff as the cellphone transmits/receives if then? I'm far from an expert in this, so any explanation would be great.

Re:Electromagnetic Where Exactly?

[sjames]

No, actually it IS radio waves from the little electrons zipping around in the phone being detected. Of course, little electrons zipping around are always involved in radio waves.

You'd be amazed what signal processing can do, especially if you can also see in a video when the function your looking for was triggered.

This is another example of Van Eck phreaking. It's so easy in some cases, it can be accidental. Back in the early '80s, I noticed the interference on channel 5 of the TV had a repeating pattern to it. As I studied it carefully, I realized it was the screensaver from my PC in the next room.

Mod parent down

[Prune]

If you've ever designed a circuit board where you had to worry about isolation of interference between sections and using groundplanes and filtering correctly, you'd know the trivial answer as to what is going on here and why your post is totally wrong: interference from the processor will cause some small modulation in the phone's radio circuits. Despite any shielding, there are multiple channels through which such interference is coupled inside a cellphone.