TempestSDR VS gr-tempest

TempestSDR

Look into SDRs and performing a tempest attack. I’ve done it in the past https://github.com/martinmarinov/TempestSDR

Also possible with a $20 USB dongle and this open-source software.

This is actually an open source project which is a software defined radio for monitoring a monitor https://github.com/martinmarinov/TempestSDR

Additionally, another implementation, TempestSDR, has some built in autocorrelation logic to help you determine resolution and refresh rate of the target. There's some good documentation and a masters thesis from the author of TempestSDR here: https://github.com/martinmarinov/TempestSDR/tree/master/documentation

If you want to see examples of this method, this GitHub project is able to remotely read computer monitors, and if you own a macbook air, this project can transmit radio signals

GR-Tempest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Bx1R_y5xSk & https://github.com/git-artes/gr-tempest

> gr-tempest, a GNU Radio-based implementation of TEMPEST, is an on-going project whose objective is to emulate and extend TempestSDR functionalities, while enabling simpler experimentation and taking advantage of GNU Radio’s functionalities and support. In this talk, I will describe the mathematical principles behind the TEMPEST attack and present how gr-tempest works. Furthermore, I will show several real-world examples including both VGA and HDMI, and the fundamental differences between both types of signals.

Its worth noting that prior to the growth of cable/satellite TV channels and the introduction of Digital TV broadcasting... the "TV Detector" was actually a real workable process. Regardless of how often their enforcement actually used them or how diligently they used them (and thus false positives). The fact the "evidence" from the vans was never used in court does not mean they could not or did not work.

"TV Detection" was actually just a civilian use of Radiation Intelligence, the kind of RF emanation that the USA has the entire TEMPEST hardening requirements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename) in order to prevent nation state attackers from being able to snoop data from their electronic equipment. This is a very real security principle and plenty of demonstrations out there to show how much information can be leaked from unshielded systems. You can check out gr-tempest which uses modern software defined radio hardware https://github.com/git-artes/gr-tempest. You can see pretty good demo of it here https://old.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/q59ofn/i_was_finall...

The basic truth is that over time it got harder and harder to build "simple" detectors to work out if people were using their TVs to watch the BBC (and this is the tricky part, a valid argument is "I don't watch the BBC", so they need to detect BBC channels being displayed on the TV and not detect other channels) and so it gradually became a less and less directly useful tool for the license enforcement teams to use, so it has sort of transformed from a genuine relatively accurate tool, into a sort of mythical boogeyman that gets used to scare people into paying for the license. The wikipedia article is actually pretty good for explaining how the older detection mechanisms worked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van#Detection_tech...