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Comment on RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysisparent

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I suspect that, in practice, playing music will provide enough of a barrier to mitigate attacks using these side-channels. But then again, in practice, I'd hope that attacks using these side-channels are pretty infrequent to begin with.

Besides, in practice, upgrading to GnuPG 1.4.16 (released today) is supposed to also mitigate the key extraction attack using this side channel.

The naive approach I suggested would be easily defeated by playing two songs from two different sources; which itself would be defeated by setting up soundcloud on two devices in both places and carefully setting up/analyzing/modelling the room so that you can adjust the signal you're subtracting to account for the distance the sound waves travel and whatnot. I think after a while you just get increasing complexity and diminishing returns -- i.e. it becomes an arms race.

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