Impressive research, but the countermeasure is fifty years old: adequate shielding. The authors did not find a fundamental flaw in cameras; they found cheap plastic enclosures.
Really interesting concept! I would not have thought of EMR variation as a usable side channel for this.
IIUC, the EMR increases following scene changes (like a light being turned on or off) are a result of the fact that video codecs try hard to compress similar images. So, I speculate that an "extremely bad codec" that simply dumps raw pixels to storage would not produce such variation, and therefore remain undetectable?
The speaker in the video was extremely difficult for me to understand but the idea seems quite clever.
What I'm most surprised about is just how well it actually works... I did not think such EM fluctuations would be usably detectable from several meters away... but I suppose this may be moreso due to improper/lack of shielding in the first place, which I would think should be easily fixable in most products to mitigate this type of detection.
IIUC, the EMR increases following scene changes (like a light being turned on or off) are a result of the fact that video codecs try hard to compress similar images. So, I speculate that an "extremely bad codec" that simply dumps raw pixels to storage would not produce such variation, and therefore remain undetectable?
What I'm most surprised about is just how well it actually works... I did not think such EM fluctuations would be usably detectable from several meters away... but I suppose this may be moreso due to improper/lack of shielding in the first place, which I would think should be easily fixable in most products to mitigate this type of detection.