One of the more esoteric uses for a FUNcube Dongle


Folks

As you may know, although the FUNcube Dongle was originally designed with receiving signals from space in mind, there’s nothing special about extraterrestrial radio waves when compared to those on terra firma.

In fact, at least one FUNcube Dongle has even found its way into space itself on board a satellite.

Back here with our feet on the ground, I received a link to an article in TechRepublic about security researchers at Tel Aviv University using the FUNcube Dongle to sniff the ether around computers, and determine security keys in a so-called side-channel attack.

Normally the RF hash associated with computers is something that we try to avoid, but as far as I can tell, the researchers sniff the RF fingerprint of the cipher algorithms from the computer, and from that they can determine keys used in schemes like RSA.

The original report is here.

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