DEF CON 17 - Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco - Sniffing Keystrockes with Lasers and Voltmeters
Channel: DEFCONConference
Date: 21/11/2013

Sniff Keystrokes With Lasers/Voltmeters - Side Channel Attacks Using Optical Sampling Of Mechanical Energy And Power Line Leakage


Andrea Barisani Chief Security Engineer, Inverse Path Ltd.

Founder& Project Coordinator, oCERT

Daniele Bianco Hardware Hacker, Inverse Path Ltd. 

TEMPEST attacks, exploiting Electro Magnetic emissions in order to gather data, are often mentioned by the security community, movies and wanna-be spies (or NSA employees we guess...).

While some expensive attacks, especially the ones against CRT/LCD monitors, have been fully researched and described, some others remain relatively unknown and haven't been fully (publicly) researched. 

Following the overwhelming success of the SatNav Traffic Channel hijacking talk continue with the tradition of presenting cool and cheap hardware hacking projects. 

We will exploring two unconventional approaches for remotely sniffing keystrokes on laptops and desktop computers. The only thing you need for successful attacks are either the electrical grid or a distant line of sight...and no expensive piece of equipment is required.

We will show in detail the two attacks and all the necessary instructions for setting up the equipment. As usual cool gear and videos are going to be featured in order to maximize the presentation.

Andrea Barisani is a security researcher and consultant. His professional career began 8 years ago but all really started when a Commodore-64 first arrived in his home when he was 10. Now, 17 years later, Andrea is having fun with large-scale IDS/Firewalls deployment and administration, forensic analysis, vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, security training and his Open Source projects. He eventually found that system and security administration are the only effective way to express his need for paranoia. Being an active member of the international Open Source and security community he's maintainer/author of the tenshi, ftester projects as well as the founder and project coordinator of the oCERT effort, the Open Source Computer Emergency Reponse Team.


He has been involved in the Gentoo project, being a member of the Gentoo Security and Infrastructure Teams, and the Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual, becoming an ISECOM Core Team member. Outside the community he has been a security consultant for Italian firms and he's now the co-founder and Chief Security Engineer of Inverse Path Ltd. 


He has been a speaker and trainer at PacSec, CanSecWest, BlackHat and DefCon conferences among many others, speaking about SatNav hacking, 0-days, LDAP and other pretty things.

Daniele Bianco is a system administrator and IT consultant. He began his professional career as a system administrator during his early years at university. His interest for centralized management and software integration in Open Source environments has focused his work on design and development of suitable R&D infrastructure. 

For the time being Daniele is working as a consultant for Italian astrophysics research institutes, involving support for the design, development and the administration of IT infrastructure.

One of his hobbies has always been playing with hardware and recently he has been pointing his attention on in-car wireless and navigation systems. He's the resident Hardware Hacker for international consultancy Inverse Path Ltd. Daniele holds a Bachelor's degree in physics from University of Trieste.

For copies of the slides and additional materials please see the DEF CON 17 Archive here: https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-17-archive.html