[Cryptography] 'The intelligence coup of the century'

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 14 Feb 2020, Bill Stewart wrote:

> The TEMPEST-shielded room we had in the mid-late 80s was good to about 
> 120dB at 450MHz.  Since the VAX ran at 10 MHz, this wasn't too much of a 
> risk, though the early Sun Sparc machines were probably 100 MHz and may 
> have leaked some harmonics.

One of my clients in a previous life was HMAS Watson, which is a training 
facility for the Royal Australian Navy (so I can't say too much); I was 
responsible for maintaining their Unix boxes.

Anyway, the servers were supposed to be located in a shielded room (I 
don't know whether it was supposed to be TEMPEST-rated) and one of the 
officer's pagers went off.  He was flabbergasted, and posited that if that 
stuff could get in, then what was getting out?

-- Dave