IP: Latest privacy threat: Monitor glow

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: frank millheim jr <millheif () yahoo com>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 10:10:13 -0700 (PDT)
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Latest privacy threat: Monitor glow

dave, thought this might be of interest. yet
another - obscure - booster for flat screen
technology.

====================================
Latest privacy threat: Monitor glow
Tue May 14,12:07 PM ET
Robert Lemos CNET News.com

BERKELEY, Calif.--Law enforcement and
intelligence agents may have a new tool to read
the data displayed on a suspect's computer
monitor, even when they can't see the screen.

Marcus Kuhn, an associate professor at Cambridge
University in England, presented research Monday
showing how anybody with a brawny PC, a special
light detector and some lab hardware could
reconstruct what a person sees on the screen by
catching the reflected glow from the monitor.

******** this says a lot about the audience. This is rather
Common knowledge about many quarters djf


The results surprised many security researchers
gathered here at the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) Symposium on
Security and Privacy because they had assumed
that discerning such detail was impossible.

"No one even thought about the optical issues" of
computer information "leakage," said Fred Cohen,
security practitioner in residence for the
University of New Haven. "This guy didn't just
publish, he blew (the assumptions) apart."

Many intelligence agencies have worried about
data leaking from classified computers through
telltale radio waves produced by internal
devices. And a recent research paper outlined the
threat of an adversary reading data from the
blinking LED lights on a modem. Kuhn's research
adds the glow of a monitor to the list of
dangers. 

Eavesdropping on a monitor's glow takes advantage
of the way that cathode-ray tubes, the technology
behind the screen, work. In most computer
monitors, a beam of electrons is shot at the
inside of the screen, which is covered in various
phosphors, causing each pixel to glow red, green
or blue, thereby producing an image.

<snip>


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/cn/20020514/tc_cn/latest_priv
acy_threat__monitor_glow&printer=1



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