Covertly intercepting video signals is a very old-fashioned way to go about electronic spying, but a new method discovered by researchers puts a frightening spin on it.
A research team out of Uruguay has found that it’s possible to intercept the wireless electromagnetic radiation coming from an HDMI cable and interpret the video by processing it with AI. Three scientists from the University of the Republic in Montevideo published their findings on Cornell’s ArXiv service, spotted by Techspot.
According to the paper, it’s possible to train an AI model to interpret the tiny fluctuations in electromagnetic energy from the wired HDMI signal. Even though it’s a wired standard and it’s usually encrypted digitally, there’s enough electromagnetic signal coming off of these cables to detect without direct access.
Detecting and decoding are two different things, of course. But the researchers also found that using an AI model paired to text recognition software, it’s possible to “read” the wirelessly recorded EM radiation with up to 70 percent accuracy.
Though that’s a long way from a conventional recording, it’s still a 60 percent improvement over previous methods—and it’s more than enough to steal passwords and other sensitive information. It’s even possible to do wirelessly without physical access to a target computer, even from the outside of a building under ideal conditions.
