by Tom Simonite, Technology Review
The processors in smart phones and tablets leak radio signals that betray the encryption keys used to protect sensitive data. At the RSA computer security conference last week, Gary Kenworthy of Cryptography Research held up an iPod Touch on stage and looked over to a TV antenna three meters away. The signal picked up by the antenna, routed through an amplifier and computer software, revealed the secret key being used by an app running on the device to encrypt data. An attacker with access to this key could use it to perfectly impersonate the device he stole it from—to access e-mail on a company server, for example. The antenna was detecting radio signals “leaking” from the transistors on the chip inside the phone performing the encryption calculations.
http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/39855/?p1=A2
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