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Acoustic cryptanalysis |
 | | When several computers are present, they can be told apart by their different acoustic signatures, since these vary with the hardware, the component temperatures, and other environmental conditions. |
 | | Another acoustic source is hard disk head seeks; this source does not appear very useful in the presence of caching, delayed writes and multitasking. |
 | | This computer was chosen for its particularly striking acoustic emanations, but is by no means a special case: every computer we tested showed significant correlation between acoustic spectrum and CPU activities, and in about half the cases the effect could be heard by naked ear when using appropriate CPU activity patterns. |
| people.csail.mit.edu /tromer/acoustic (1820 words) |
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