Researchers crack encryption by listening to the sound of the CPU

[starwarp2000]

Researchers crack the world's toughest encryption by listening to the tiny sounds made by your computer's CPU

Security researchers have successfully broken one of the most secure encryption algorithms, 4096-bit RSA, by listening – yes, with a microphone — to a computer as it decrypts some encrypted data. The attack is fairly simple and can be carried out with rudimentary hardware. The repercussions for the average computer user are minimal, but if you're a secret agent, power user, or some other kind of encryption-using miscreant, you may want to reach for the Rammstein when decrypting your data.

The researchers successfully extracted decryption keys over a distance of four meters (13 feet) with a high-quality parabolic microphone. Perhaps more intriguingly, though, they also managed to pull of this attack with a smartphone placed 30 centimeters (12 inches) away from the target laptop. The researchers performed the attack on different laptops and desktops, with varying levels of success. For what it's worth, the same kind of electrical data can also be divined from many other sources — the power socket on the wall, the remote end of an Ethernet cable, or merely by touching the computer (while measuring your body's potential relative to the room's ground potential).

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/173108-researchers-crack-the-worlds-toughest-encryption-by-listening-to-the-tiny-sounds-made-by-your-computers-cpu

Research paper: RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis [PDF]: http://www.tau.ac.il/~tromer/papers/acoustic-20131218.pdf