[Cryptography] 'The intelligence coup of the century'

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 09:08:51PM -0800, Henry Baker wrote:
> 
> BTW, IBM mainframes had powerful radio side-channels: in the early
> 1960's, one of the programmers that worked with me used to put an
> ordinary portable radio on top of the IBM CPU so that he could
> "listen" to his program go through its paces.  Any change in the
> audio would indicate a problem with the software.

This wasn't just IBM mainframes.  There was a program (I think from
DECUS, but I could be wrong) that would broadcast music from a PDP-8/i
to an AM radio.  As I recall one of songs that it would play was
"Flight of the Bumblebee".

In this case, though, I don't think we could call it a "side channel"
since the whole *point* of the program was to force radio
"interference" (I'm pretty sure the PDP-8/i wasn't certified by the
FCC as a radio transmitter).  :-)

	     	     	  		       - Ted