[Cryptography] Regulations of Tempest protections of buildings

[Aram Perez]

On Apr 02, 2017, at 02:10 PM, mok-kong shen <mok-kong.shen at t-online.de> wrote:

I wrote previously in a follow-up to a thread that I vaguely remember
to have read
that in US a permission is needed for Farady shielding of rooms,
whereupon a few
readers doubted its correctness. I have just succeeded to again find the
source:

A. Stanoyevitch, Discrete Structures with Contemporary Applications. CRC
Press,
2011. On p.301 there is:

Buildings can be fitted using a special insulation procedure that
protects
against tempest devices, but any company or individual in the US
who has
this insulation must first obtain a license from the federal
Government.



I can't comment on the license/legality issue but there was a time, not that many years ago, that cryptography was considered as "munitions" by the US government. If you were a US citizen, you could not sell any crypto-related product outside the US without getting a license from the government. You weren't supposed to discuss cryptography outside the US either.



I do have an interesting anecdote related to Tempest (FS-1027) rooms: I used to work for a defense contractor that had a contract to install a secure computer system and network at an Air Force base. For the computers, we used Tempest rated PCs and for the network, we used a fiber optic Ethernet network. Of course, the cost was triple the regular price. The PCs were supposed to be connect to an IBM mini-computer (I forget the model). Because you couldn't buy a Tempest mini-computer, we hired a special building contractor (that had a top secret clearance) to build a Tempest room to house the mini-computer and other equipment. When the contractor had completed the work, the room was tested to make sure it didn't radiate and it would pass the Tempest regulations, which it did.


Everything was working fine until one weekend when it rained most of Saturday and Sunday. When we went to work the following Monday, most of the equipment in the Tempest room was damaged by the water that dripped on the equipment in the room. Although the Tempest room didn't radiate, it wasn't waterproof! Because it would take too much time to get the special contractor to make the room waterproof, we had to make tents out of PVC pipes and plastic tarps to cover all the equipment in the room. That way, in the future, the water would drip off to the sides and not into the equipment itself. I always wanted to take a photo of the tents but I knew they wouldn't let me.



/Aram


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