Known Attacks
In 2004, Dmitri Asonov and Rakesh Agrawal of the IBM Almaden Research Center announced that computer keyboards and keypads used on telephones and automated teller machines (ATMs) are vulnerable to attacks based on differentiating the sound produced by different keys. Their attack employed a neural network to recognize the key being pressed.
By analyzing recorded sounds, they were able to recover the text of data being entered. These techniques allow an attacker using covert listening devices to obtain passwords, passphrases, personal identification numbers (PINs), and other information entered via keyboards.
In 2005, a group of UC Berkeley researchers performed a number of practical experiments demonstrating the validity of this kind of threat.
Also in 2004, Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer demonstrated that it may be possible to conduct timing attacks against a CPU performing cryptographic operations by analysis of variations in humming emissions (that is, its ultrasonic noise emanating from capacitors on a motherboard, not electromagnetic emissions or the human-audible humming of a cooling fan).
Read more about this topic: Acoustic Cryptanalysis
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—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
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