Evaluation of information leakage via electromagnetic emanation and effectiveness of tempest

Abstract

It is well known that there is relationship between electromagnetic emanation and processing information in IT devices such as personal computers and smart cards. By analyzing such electromagnetic emanation, eavesdropper will be able to get some information, so it becomes a real threat of information security. In this paper, we show how to estimate amount of information that is leaked as electromagnetic emanation. We assume the space between the IT device and the receiver is a communication channel, and we define the amount of information leakage via electromagnetic emanations by its channel capacity. By some experimental results of Tempest, we show example estimations of amount of information leakage. Using the value of channel capacity, we can calculate the amount of information per pixel in the reconstructed image. And we evaluate the effectiveness of Tempest fonts generated by Gaussian method and its threshold of security. Copyright © 2008 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.