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Stealing Smartphone Crypto Keys Using Radio Waves

Posted by timothy on from the rsa-rsa-rsa dept.

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."

2 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. New Phone Case. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Great. Now I need a tin foil case for my phone too.

  2. Clever. I like it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    So the CPU doesn't have a strong enough EM signal (note that all electronic processing generates EM waves) to send out the key processing details over any reasonable distance (tiny starting signal plus 1/r^2) . But it is a smartphone, and the CPU EM signal is strong enough to interfere with the (very!) nearby phone transmitter. And by examining that signal, you can tempest monitor the CPU from a much greater distance. Cool. The smartphone in effect has its own built in CPU EM signal amplifier.

    The hard bit is the details. You need the right equipment, and the right algorithms to extract the signal and then reconstruct the key.