Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology discovered a method to steal RSA encryption keys by monitoring the sounds created by a computer’s physical components. The sounds made by a computer’s parts, it turns out, can in some cases be traced back precisely to its operations.
"By recording such [acoustic] noise while a target is using the RSA algorithm to decrypt ciphertexts [sent to it by the attacker], the RSA secret key can be extracted within one hour for a high-grade 4,096-bit RSA key," the researchers wrote in a research paper. "We experimentally demonstrated this attack from as far as 10 m away using a parabolic microphone or from 30 cm away through a plain mobile phone placed next to the computer."
