Emission Security
Introduction
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History
19th century
First appearance of the emanation problem was in the 19th century, when extensive telephone wire networks were laid out. It came to cross-talks between telephone wires. People sometimes could hear other conversations on their telephone line. One way of dealing with it was to use "transpositions," whereby the wires were crossed over at intervals to make the circuit a twisted pair.
1914
The flrst appearance of compromising emanations in warfare seems to date to 1914. Field telephone wires were laid parallel to enemy trenches to connect the troops with their headquarters. The effect was again cross-talks. Listening posts were quickly established and protective measures were introduced, including the use of twisted-pair cable.
Mid-1950s
The exact date is not known in public, but it happens sometime in 1950, when the U.S. Government becomes concerned about the Emission Security problem and establishes the TEMPEST Program. The first TEMPEST standards were developed to deal with the increasing danger of espionage.
1960
In Great Britain were TV detector vans used to find illegal owners of television sets. The reason was, that TV owners had to pay an annual license fee.
1960
In 1960 was the british secret service MI5 ordered to eavesdrop the French embassy in the course of negotiations about joining the European Economic Community. The crypto analysts were not able to decrypt the enciphered signal from the French embassy, but they noticed a faint secondary signal, which was the plain text.
1970s
All about the title Emission Security vanished from the open literature.
1984
The secret service of GDR called MfS spied out the Ministry of Foreign Trade by eavesdropping the compromising emanations.
1985
The dutch researcher Wim van Eck published an unclassified paper of security risks of emanations from computer monitors. This paper caused consternation in the security community, where all thought, that those attacks were only possible with very high tech equipment. But Wim van Eck eavesdropped a system using just 15$ worth of equipment plus a television set. With this paper Emission Security came back to public attention.
1990s
Many published research about Emission Security were made for example about Vulnerabilities of smart cards (Markus Kuhn and Ross Anderson 1996) and Vulnerabilities of crypto-systems (Paul Kocher). Kuhn and Anderson also published a paper showing that compromising emanations from PCs could be countered with measures in software. 1995 were also basic information of the TEMPEST standard published.
Physical Backgrounds
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Attacks
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Countermeasures
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Links
Interesting text in german by Sebastian Lohmann from HU in 1999
Wikipedia article about TEMPEST
Very good unofficial TEMPEST information page