3 ms·

Cryptographers: is this as bad as it looks?

• kallistisoft 5y ago
  Doesn't appear so, as there were a lot of experimental constraints... The attacks demonstrated in the paper require a significant amount of prior knowledge and specific circumstances in order to work: 1) The make and model of the target laptop 2) Knowledge of the computational task being executed on the target machine 3) Training data from the target machine 4) Unusual usage patterns by the user The first two pieces of info can be acquired via surveillance and social engineering, the last two are much harder to achieve. IMHO in a real world scenario, this leakage path is more usefull as adjunct to a primary attack vector. eg: being able to tell that a change in computational modality has occurred with course insight into the nature of that change
• upofadown 5y ago
  The key extraction is not any sort of actual practical attack. It is a pure demonstration of the principle. It is yet another example of the principle that leaks are leaks and that is is hard to know which ones are important. It strongly suggests that platforms should not transmit anything coupled to the internal operation of the platform. Why are audio systems (this one was Mumble) sending all this junk in the lower bits of the audio samples? Why not zero that out as part of the automatic gain control scheme? The receiver doesn't want to hear it anyway,