Tempest for Eliza

posted Dec 25th 2005 11:00am by Eliot Phillips
filed under: peripherals hacks

tempest

“Tempest for Eliza” is a program written by Erik Thiele to demonstrate the RF transmission properties of CRT monitors. The program is capable of transmitting sound over AM frequencies just by the unique way it drives the monitor. The electromagnetic emissions of CRTs can be a security problem as demonstrated by Van Eck phreaking, watching someone’s screen just by collecting RF transmissions. In the late ’90s Ross Anderson developed software to help reduce the RF transmissions of monitors. These specialized fonts combined with shielding can greatly reduce the risk of attack and is something the NSA has been researching for many years.

[thanks gsham]

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this is awesome! i wonder what the range on something like this is

Posted at 11:16 am on Dec 25th, 2005 by Jacob

this is awesome! i wonder what the range on something like this is

Posted at 11:16 am on Dec 25th, 2005 by Jacob

Is it me or are CRTs a thing of the past? If i had one this would be sweet party trick.

Posted at 12:21 pm on Dec 25th, 2005 by bird603568

@bird603568

i’m using a crt right now. a lot of hardcore gamers still use them. plus where i work they still use them.

Posted at 12:31 pm on Dec 25th, 2005 by Matthew

Merry Cristmas!

Posted at 12:44 pm on Dec 25th, 2005 by Bobert

At my work my dual monitor set up is a laptop and a crt. I have the laptop on a fed ex box so it is level with the crt.

Posted at 12:47 pm on Dec 25th, 2005 by FRosty

This is sooo old. I did this several years ago. As I recall, this works not only for CRT’s because its not actually the CRT its self that generates the RF noise, but the cable that carries the signal. I think it will work on LCD’s that have an analog connection. Of course if its digital, then no go.

Posted at 1:11 pm on Dec 25th, 2005 by Eric

CRTs are perfectly usable, since they are better gaming screens (we can use diff resolutions, no trails, etc.) and they are so much cheaper compared to the LCD of the same size

Posted at 3:56 pm on Dec 25th, 2005 by monster

oo oldie-but-[very]-goodie. thanks eliot – i had forgotten about this one. i love hacks like this where the capabilities of a device are stretched far beyond their original scope. a crt as a transmitter? fantastic! its a wonderful thing to turn the (otherwise annoying) fcc rules, part 15b into something useful — or at the least, something amusing.

regarding van eck phreaking: my thoughts immediately went to stephenson’s cryptonomicon. (if you havent heard of it and are reading this website, something is amiss. buy/steal/borrow a copy of this book immediately). given the design of a CRT, its understandably easier to detect residual radiation indicative of onscreen content than it is with an lcd. however, while many people scoff at the idea, LCDs do not really prevent the same effects from occuring. a substantial emf field is pumped out of every LCD too. luckily field dropoff 1/d^2 comes to our rescue. if you’re still worried, quickly don your tinfoil hat and into the faraday cage you go!

for the doubting: if the eliza’s tempest blaring from your radio is unconvincing, find yourself a field strength meter and test it yourself. you might be surprised.

..and as an aside: oh man…you know you’ve got the bug when you’re excitedly typing out this stuff like i do. if you’ve read this far, many thanks for sharing the same sentiments.

Posted at 4:16 pm on Dec 25th, 2005 by Steve

Does anybody have an x86/Windows binary for those of us who are too lazy to install a new OS and compile the tar just to run the proof of concept?

Posted at 4:42 pm on Dec 25th, 2005 by madmax

This reminds me of a computer show I was at back in ‘78. Some of us smug Apple ][ owners went over to the Radio Shack booth to harrass their rep about how the TRS-80 didn’t have color or sound and the fact that we did. The rep showed us their new sound technology: he set an AM radio next to the computer and ran some software that created interference on the radio that barely passed as music.

Posted at 4:51 pm on Dec 25th, 2005 by Vince

Haha we are not the only fools!
In the eighties we had a Sinclair ZX-81, with an memory extension of 16k, and with some additional with which we could feed it machine code. My dad found out it caused our Philips b&w TV (connected to the ZX-81 as monitor) to make a sound at a certain action which i do not remember.
He went totally fanatic on this, and made a machine code program to feed it with a tune in a string, such as A3C3G4 etc. And behold! It worked. On that particular TV set [add a lot of white noise here].

We were a bit hurt about the lack of enthousiasm given to it at the ZX81 computer club…

Posted at 5:38 pm on Dec 25th, 2005 by Arakrys

There is some better van eck info here http://gbppr.trighost.org/mil/vaneck/

Posted at 6:49 pm on Dec 25th, 2005 by asdf

I’m using a CRT right now, frnakly I don’t know why people love LCD sooo much.

Posted at 7:55 pm on Dec 25th, 2005 by ez

merry christmas everyone!

Posted at 11:20 pm on Dec 25th, 2005 by chris

Yeah, I tried this a while back, and never could find an AM radio. Pretty sweet thou.

Posted at 1:26 am on Dec 26th, 2005 by Drew

To post 11!… I remember my Dad typing in something from a magazine that did that on our zx81. You could press keys on the keyboard to create different notes.

I can’t remember the make of the tv but it was white plastic with two black knobs, one for tuning to the channels and one for volume(on/off). The picture was b/w as well.

Posted at 2:52 am on Dec 26th, 2005 by Marvin

http://eckbox.sourceforge.net/

Posted at 6:53 pm on Dec 26th, 2005 by Daedalus

That’s pretty cool.

Did anyone get the MP3 playback to work, though? For me, it runs through the whole MP3 in like 5 seconds and doesn’t sound anything like it should. I looked at the code, and I don’t see anything that should slow it down. I’m using the proprietary NVidia drivers, and I tried both settings for VSYNC.

Posted at 8:36 pm on Dec 26th, 2005 by tom

Cool, i was wondering if this would work with a tv. because i have my computer hooked up to an lcd monitor and a tv. i have a crt monitor in the basement but im too lazy to go get it but i really want to try this.

john

Posted at 1:00 am on Dec 28th, 2005 by John

wait…i dont have linux

Posted at 7:28 pm on Dec 28th, 2005 by John

you can do the same thing with a graphing calculator

Posted at 10:02 pm on Dec 28th, 2005 by rick

I’m using 2 CRT’s, 21 and 17 inch. Cheaper, more resolutions, but the 21in is HEAVY!

Posted at 9:46 am on Dec 29th, 2005 by jstem

yeah, rock on with CRTs. More bang for your buck, and when you put it in a corner, the CRT’s extra size isn’t as much of a factor. Not that I don’t use LCDs whenever possible. Not that I don’t have them installed at all my clients’ offices. But I just bought a computer off of a friend, and Guild Wars looks amazing at 1600×1200 on max everything. Besides, after the cost of the computer, you use whatever you’ve got until the paycheck arrives. I can’t believe everyone’s offloading their CRTs! They make great server terminal consoles. I mean…yeah. Does anyone use an LCD as a server screen? I guess if space was limited…

[/offtopic] I seem to remember doing something similar with a game system a while back, and something was picking up the sound. Guess that was just unshielded cabling, but anyone with a Nokia will recognize the buzzing noise emitted from nearby speakers when the cellular transmissions come in. This whole thing also reminds me of that hack with the DS a while back where images were being picked up on a nearby Watchman.

…and people are surprised by hackers sniffing their “private” transmissions? lol. sorry for the musing.

Posted at 7:38 pm on Dec 30th, 2005 by coreycubed

I have done a van eck phreaking hardware.

If you have any doubt contact me.

See this http://www.dreamviews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24630

Posted at 10:02 am on Jan 2nd, 2006 by Unni Koroth

Tempest for Eliza

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