One of the recent Snowden revelations was a catalog of spying items that the NSA’s “Tailored Access Operations” unit had for breaking into bad guys’ computers. Most of the items weren’t particularly surprising. We already know that since they can’t break cryptography, they try to break into endpoints, where the plaintext lives – and even if we hadn’t known that from recent revelations, it makes complete sense for them to operate that way. What was surprising was the Tempest stuff.

To explain a bit, Tempest is the code word for spying on people’s computers via unintentional electronic emanations. A computer monitor, for instance, is driven by a high frequency signal which more or less broadcasts whatever is being shown on the monitor. If thoroughly shielded it wouldn’t be broadcasting, but it never is thoroughly shielded, except in special Tempest rated equipment such as is sold to various agencies of the federal government who worry about such things. And the broadcast is performed regularly at 60 times a second (at least that’s the usual refresh rate these days), a piece of redundancy which makes the signal easier to retrieve. Old-fashioned CRTs amplified this signal to high voltage to shoot it through an electron gun, but as Markus Kuhn has found, even modern flat panel displays can produce decipherable emanations.

But how well Tempest worked in practice was never quite clear to me. Okay, various demos have shown it to work in some cases. But whether those cases are typical has been unclear; monitors no doubt vary in how well their shielding is designed and built. And even if you can do a good job picking up the signal from one monitor, in practice there’ll probably be tens or hundreds of monitors within range; what can you do with the resulting mess of signals stomping all over each other? So it was no surprise reading, a while ago, in the book Security Engineering, by Kuhn’s Ph.D. advisor Ross Anderson, that

“Despite the hype with which the Tempest industry maintained itself during the Cold War, there is a growing scepticism about whether any actual Tempest attacks had ever been mounted by foreign agents in the USA.”

and

“Having been driven around an English town looking for Tempest signals, I can testify that doing such attacks is much harder in practice than it might seem in theory…”

What was a surprise was looking at the recently-leaked NSA catalog and seeing an entry for a “radar”. Radar? What is this, for tracking airplanes? “Primary uses include VAGRANT and DROPMIRE collection”. Googling those, they turn out to be Tempest stuff, the former being on computer screens and the latter on printers.

So that’s how the pros do it: not just by passively listening for emanations, but by making emanations. This unit, the “CTX4000”, broadcasts at a frequency adjustable from 1 to 2 gigahertz, and listens for return signals with a bandwidth of up to 45 megahertz. (As the catalog states, this unit is obsolete and, in 2008, was already scheduled for replacement; modern flat-panel displays are driven by signals of higher bandwidth than that.) Power levels are “up to 2W using the internal amplifier; external amplifiers make it possible to go up to 1kW”. The carrier wave is broadcast continuously.

But this calls for another bit of explanation, as to why this would work. Well, to start with the simple part, the use of a “radar” makes it possible to pick out the device you want to spy on: point the antennas at it, and not at all the other devices within range. Antennas at these sorts of frequencies can be quite directional without being too large. The more complicated part, at least to the uninitiated, is the modulation: why would you get back a signal of interest modulated on to the carrier wave?

Well, you might not. If all the materials involved are “linear”, you won’t; if frequencies A and B are present in a linear device, each might be attenuated or amplified, and/or phase shifted, but no new frequencies will be generated. Linear devices include wires, resistors, capacitors, and inductors – at least the ideal versions of all those. (Real versions are of course subtly nonlinear, but probably not usefully enough so for the present purpose.) But silicon devices (transistors, diodes, and such) are all nonlinear – though for small signals, they can be more-or-less linear; thus the utility of high “radar” power, to force them into their nonlinear regimes. Going through a nonlinear device, signals “mix”; in radio technology, the ideal “mixer” is a multiplier, but in practice one usually uses some cruder mixer which does something very far from an exact multiplication. When you pass frequencies A and B through an ideal two-input mixer, you get out the frequencies A+B and A-B. That’s for an exact multiplication of A by B; if the mixer is cruder, you also get frequencies such as A, B, 2A, 2B, A+2B, A+3B, 2A-2B, and so forth.

In the case of a spy beam, the nonlinear “mixer” might be the transmit or receive transistor at one end of the wire connecting the computer to the video monitor. Frequency A might be somewhere in the signal driving the screen (which perhaps spans the frequency range of zero to 30 MHz), and frequency B the spy beam (perhaps 1.5 GHz), picked up by that same wire acting as an antenna. Then the mixer generates a modulated version of the spy beam (1.5 GHz +/- 30 MHz), which will then get re-radiated and picked up by the spy’s antenna. As for the unwanted mix frequencies, many of them are outside the frequency ranges which are being received (e.g. 2A+2B, which is about 3 GHz). As for the rest, one can try to filter them out somehow, or one can just hope that they generate a low enough level of noise that the resulting signal is still decipherable. This being spy work, one doesn’t need a perfect image of the screen being spied on or of the page printed by the printer being spied on. It’s enough if the text is readable; it doesn’t have to look pretty.

If this isn’t good enough, you might have to sneak into the building and implant something. The device codenamed RAGEMASTER, perhaps, at a unit cost of $30. They recommend putting it onto the red video line; “it was found that, empirically, this provides the best video return and cleanest readout of the monitor contents”. In the photo, it seems to be a tiny little device that won’t even put a bulge in the cable where implanted: just some well-chosen nonlinearity, probably in silicon. Presumably in practice you slit the cable insulation to insert it, then somehow seal the slit closed.

Or you might also sneak in if you want other services, such as a microphone in the room. The catalog has microphones which insert into cabling and are readable via “radar”. It also has devices which can be implanted on low-frequency channels such as keyboards, to make reading those via “radar” feasible.

In any case, this system is quite easily detected by the intended victim, since he is being continuously illuminated by a microwave signal at rather substantial power. In the Cold War, the US embassy in Moscow frequently complained to the Russians about being irradiated with microwave beams. The NSA probably isn’t so gauche as to use power levels that actually harm the victim personally (the one-kilowatt option would be for use at a great distance, not for frying people at close range), but even the lower sorts of power levels furnish more than enough power to use standard direction finding techniques on, so as to track the spy beam back to its source. But using a sledgehammer on the source seems ill-advised, it (in its latest version, “PHOTOANGLO”) being government property with a price tag of “$40k (planned)” and likely twice that after the usual cost overruns.

The only caveat about the easy detectability would be if they were using spread spectrum techniques; spread spectrum stuff can be hard to detect. A cryptographically-spread signal can be below the noise floor and undetectable to people who don’t know the cryptographic key, and yet still can convey useful information to someone with the cryptographic key. But while that’s enough to make communications invisible, it can’t necessarily make radar invisible. With radar, the power level at the target has to be high enough that even faint echoes of it are detectable back at the radar unit. Also, high-frequency spread-spectrum stuff is hard to design and build, and my guess is that if they were using such techniques they’d be boasting about it in the catalog. So these NSA “radars” are probably easily detectable: just wave around a frequency counter, and it’ll tell you what frequency you are being illuminated at.

At any rate, this NSA Tempest stuff is too interesting for it to have really been a good idea to leak it. It doesn’t relate to dragnet surveillance of the whole population: the “radar” has to be pointed at one particular target, and someone has to get close to the target to emplace the “radar” and operate it. It’s an expensive unit, and the salaries of the people manning it are even more expensive. It’s for when they want to pay very close attention to a very special person, not for serving as everyone’s nanny.

Update (May 21, 2014): We now have a list of targets, as of 2010, via Glenn Greenwald; see pages 58–60 of his “Documents from No Place To Hide” pdf. The listed targets for “VAGRANT” or “DROPMIRE”, all UN missions in New York City or embassies in Washington DC, are:

  • the Brazilian UN mission
  • the “EU/Emb” (presumably the EU Delegation to the US)
  • the French UN mission
  • the Georgian embassy
  • the Indian UN mission
  • the Indian embassy
  • the Japanese UN mission
  • the Slovakian embassy
  • the South African UN mission
  • the South Korean UN mission
  • the Taiwanese consulate in NYC
  • the Vietnamese UN mission

Some of these apparently were done to give the US government an edge in the negotiations over sanctions on Iran. Of course this is most probably not a complete list. In any case, embassies are traditional targets for spying, who should already know about frequency counters and spectrum analyzers and such.

Update (Aug 13, 2014): I’d attributed this leak to Snowden, but Bruce Schneier is of the opinion that it is from a second leaker, which seems quite plausible, as this is not mass surveillance, which has been Snowden’s main emphasis, nor was it published by the people to whom Snowden gave his documents.