Side Channels
Ross Anderson · 2020
Side channel attacks are everywhere, and 3–4 of them have caused multi-billion dollar losses. It's mostly military organizations that worry about Tempest, where the stray radio frequency emitted by computers and other electronic equipment is picked up by an opponent and used to reconstruct the data being processed. It has become an issue for voting machines too, after a Dutch group found they could tell at a distance which party a voter had selected on a voting machine, and attacks have also been demonstrated on automatic teller machines. This chapter considers passive attacks, that is, attacks in which the opponent exploits electromagnetic signals that are presented to him without any effort on his part to create them. The past twenty years have seen a host of side-channel attacks that exploit human behaviour and the environment of the device.