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Re: Canadian "spy coin" tech revealed!
05-10-2007, 03:53 AM
I read about this in the Metro yesterday. I'm still not certain how to respond.
--
Ah the sweet smell of running a component at >10 times it's max-rated
power dissipation. Brings back memories...
-- James Riden
Canadian Spy Coins
05-10-2007, 05:18 AM
(boggle)
You mean, some people actually believed this?!
What would be the point of radio tracking a coin? All you'd get is the location of the coin, not who it belonged to or how many times it had exchanged hands...
(shakes head)
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Re: Canadian Spy Coins
05-10-2007, 02:23 PM
The concern wasn't radio tracking, it was radio eavesdropping.
(As if something the size of a quarter would be able to hold a battery large enough to make that practical... )
-Rob Kelk
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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Well, actually...
05-13-2007, 07:50 PM
Y'know, it's not *totally* beyond the realm of possibility.
The Soviets did something roughly similar once, during the Cold War (late '50s, I think this was), that was well-documented. The bug in that case was a hanging plaque of some kind that was presented to an American embassy staffer and hung on the wall in his office. No batteries, no wiring, just (IIRC) a pair of tubes that made the aural part of a resonant RF circuit. If it was 'illuminated' by a radio beam at the right frequency, it would re-radiate a fractional-power reflection of that signal with whatever the voices of anyone speaking in that office modulated on top of it. Took forever to find the darn thing, b/c the remote operators could hear the bug-sweeping crews running and kill the illumination beam. Even after it was found, they couldn't make heads or tails out of it until the diagram was shown to one of MI-5's technical whiz kids.
So, pulling the same trick with a coin-sized object might not be totally out in tinfoil-hat country. We already have RFID tags working at very small sizes and w/o any internal power, so there's no reason we couldn't layer a microphone and some superhet circuitry atop an existing RFID base. Of course, it might not be worth the effort -- clarity would be poor, and countersurveillance techniques take that kind of thing into account these days. But probably the biggest hazard would be the humble vending machine: after all, how do you keep the target of your bug from getting thirst and dropping the coin into the nearest Coke machine?
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RE: Well Actually
05-14-2007, 06:10 AM
I remember a related story from a TEMPEST advisory I read a few years ago.
The American embassy in Russia was being bombarded by very strong Radio Signals and it took them quite some time to figure out why they were doing that "old" trick again.
What they finally discovered was that while the security rated cords from the keyboards to the computers didn't normally radiate a signal that cord would resonate at a specific radio frequencies when there was a very strong radio signal applied.
What made this resonant signal from the cord bad was that it was also slightly modulated by the binary signals sent from the keyboard to the computer as the person typed.
In other words if you wanted to read most of the keystrokes of what someone was typing all you had to do was set up a couple of large parabolic or yagi type antennas that are well isolated from each other and in one of each others nulls or blindspots.
Then focus both on the known location of the computer your wanting to spy on and while one antenna beamed a radio signal the other antenna would pick up the modulated resonant signal from the computer's keyboard cord.
Because most keyboard cords are standardized you don't even have to know where the computers are in the embassy just bombard the entire embassy with the radio signal and use several other isolated antennas to scan for the resonant returns until you have the building mapped.
howard melton
God bless
