CRT Eavesdropping: Optical Tempest

PortalCell writes "LED status monitors may potentially leak data in a few applications, but worse: Markus Kuhn has now revealed (pdf) that it's possible to read your monitor indirectly just by observing how the blue flicker lights up the room! Forget taping up LEDs or living in a metal box - now you might have to do without sunlight to be secure!" Hopefully people will also stop submitting the LED story now.

Interesting concept but...

[ZaneMcAuley]

how practical/feasable/reliable is it? Wont data be missing if a shadow or a person walks in front of it and make it hard to put together?

On the other hand...

[danro]

Considering the quality of the output, maby a funky wallpaper and transparent terminals might be enough for all the tin foil hat type persons out there...

A _field_ test of this would probabli yield a even worse picture, methinks...

Van Eck phreaking

[ushac]

Wow, that's really neat. I wonder how good the results of this is compared to say van Eck phreaking (eavsdropping on the EMI emitted by the CRT-gun)?

Regards / ushac

Re:Knowing your enemy

[PhotoGuy]

they will now be able to eliminate potential suspects just by looking at light that was leaked from their residences

But isn't this exactly the same as the case where they used thermal imaging to determine a pot growing operation? I think that case was thrown out, as an invasion of privacy.

I don't see how decoding blue light leaking from a residence would differ from decoding infrared radiation leaking from a residence.

I'm all for catching bad guys every way possible, (and even for reducing the rights of the masses to do this) but given the current state of affairs, I don't think this would work without the same warrants required for other monitoring.

Neat technology, though. One night, after seeing the neighbors TV glow flickering on their wall, I had thought about how it should be possible to monitor people's TV viewing habits, but spotting the patterns of illumination, comparing it to known broadcasts. Should be trivial to find the best match. Just one more thing for the paranoid conspiracy theorists to worry about. :-)

-me

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