Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio on /. "Keys Leaking Through the Air At RSA"

[Michael Dickens]

No primary article ... grrrr ... but an interesting comment:

< http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1997316&cid=35215688 >

Some background (Score:5, Informative)

by Dr. JJJ (325391) on Tuesday February 15, @05:43PM (#35215688)

I'm sorry that there's no direct article for this submission, and I'm not 
certain who submitted it, but as an employee of CRI and one of the designers of 
the demo, I'd like to give you some details about what's going on.

At CRI we have a lab full of what I consider to be cool equipment, and what's 
more, some spare time to look at things. We specialize in side-channel analysis 
and we asked ourselves: what sort of side-channel leaks might be present in 
consumer PDAs? We took a USRP(1) interface that we had lying around and started 
investigating the RF emanations of a few of the devices we had easily on hand. 
We coded some simple cryptographic applications and were surprised at how 
quickly we were able to find ways to demodulate the various signals in the 
device in a way that revealed the bits of the secret keys being used.

We are indeed using GNURadio for the demo. It's been very helpful because it 
makes rapid prototyping very easy. We use gnuradio-companion to set up the 
signal processing blocks (mostly AM demodulation) and to set up a simple UI 
that helps us tune into the right carrier frequencies in real-time during the 
demo. The rest of the demo involves using our own custom waveform viewer to 
look at the demodulated signal and show visitors how we can analyze the signal 
on the screen and extract the key bits that were used during the 
encryption/decryption process on the device.