[Cryptography] 'The intelligence coup of the century'

Henry Baker hbaker1 at pipeline.com
Sat Feb 15 11:51:04 EST 2020


At 10:45 AM 2/14/2020, John Young wrote:
>At 01:25 PM 2/14/2020, you wrote:
>>> On 2020-02-14 (45), at 05:10:39, John Young <jya at pipeline.com> wrote:
>>> At 12:08 AM 2/14/2020, you wrote:
>>>> BTW, IBM mainframes had powerful radio side-channels
>>
>>[ 
 ]
>>>
>>> Is this a TEMPEST tool, perhaps long used, even now? Ross Anderson aware of it?
>>
>>IIRC, Soviet ops for a FIALKA site specified a shoot to kill perimeter of 30M.
>>__outer
>
>Do SCIFs solve this emanations threat if computers and gaggle of devices, cables and whatnot remain leaky depending on willingness to pay top prices? Crypto AG-ism has hardly gone away.

Post-WWII, the Brits used inductive coupling to grab data
from the cables leading to teletypes in SCIF-type rooms.

I believe that the U.S. & West German govts had ready access
to most all of the main telephone cables in East Berlin due
to their having been run through the subway/underground system.
Of course, the same was also true of the West Berlin cables,
but I think that the West German cables were relatively soon
patched around to avoid this attack by the Easties.

An aside re W. German telephone lines:
Thanks to the U.S. taxpayers, the U.S. replaced virtually
the *entire* W. German telephone system post-WWII.  As a
result, W. Germany has the *best copper* in the world!
So W. Germany was in a better position to utilize "DSL"
technolgy better than anywhere else.  Too bad they didn't
wire up with coax or fiber...  :-(

And during WWII itself, the Swedes tapped into the cables
running some of the German traffic through Sweden, and were
able to decrypt & read this traffic.



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