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by user5994461 3288 days ago
There is a paper on stealing RSA keys, by listening to the sound the power supply of a laptop makes, from 4 meters away with a microphone. Works wonders!
1 comments

You're referring to https://www.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/ and the line of related papers.

That's absolutely great work, but this work uses very different techniques: the authors of that line of papers feed inputs to the crypto core that amplify the dependency on the key, e.g. by ensuring that a square-and-multiply does all or no squares depending on a single bit of the key.

AES doesn't have the kind of algebraic structure that would allow such amplification, so we mostly have to do it the hard way. Fortunately, we had some very talented interns and significant in-house (analog and digital) signal processing expertise. (From colleagues' previous jobs.)