Review the excerpt from The Code Book.If Eve parks a van outside Alice's house, she can use sensitive tempest equipment to identify each individual keystroke that Alice makes on her computer. This would allow Eve to intercept the message as it is typed into the computer, before it is encrypted. To defend against tempest attacks, companies are already supplying shielding material that can be used to line the walls of a room to prevent the escape of electromagnetic signals.
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Read the excerpt from The Code Book.The Trojan horse, another software trick, involves Eve designing a program that appears to act like a genuine encryption product, but which actually betrays the user.
Read the excerpt from The Code Book.Other attacks include the use of viruses and Trojan horses. Eve might design a virus that infects PGP software and sits quietly inside Alice's computer. When Alice uses her private key to decrypt a message, the virus would wake up and make a note of it. The next time that Alice connects to the Internet, the virus would surreptitiously send the private key to Eve, thereby allowing her to decipher all subsequent messages sent to Alice.
Read the excerpt from The Code Book.Although traffic analysis, tempest attacks, viruses and Trojan horses are all useful techniques for gathering information, cryptanalysts realize that their real goal is to find a way of cracking the RSA cipher, the cornerstone of modern encryption.The RSA cipher is used to protect the most important military, diplomatic, commercial and criminal communications—exactly the messages that intelligence gathering organizations want to decipher. If they are to challenge strong RSA encryption, cryptanalysts will need to make a major theoretical or technological breakthrough.
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