Hey, everybody. First time talk. And I always thought that my first talk would be on some amazing bug that I found. But all my bugs are under NDA, unfortunately. So I'm here to talk about something else that I discovered not even working in InfoSec but studying astronomy in college that stuck with me for several years. And now here we are to talk about its security implications. And how many of you were at the talk where Jen Savage demonstrated breaking into a toy bunny that has a webcam, it's a baby monitor? So that reminded me of something that happened when I was about six or seven years old. My father had gotten a radio scanner for listening to the emergency radio, the police and the fire. And he was messing around with it, and he accidentally tuned into something that was not the place police at all or at least you hope it wasn't the police because it was a woman screaming for mercy and a man threatening to kill her. He had tuned into a baby monitor and he called the cops and they came and they saved her and there was a happy ending. Now the thing is a baby monitor is an intentional emission. It's supposed to do that but it's really easy to forget that it's broadcasting to the entire neighborhood. I bet you a dollar that man never thought for a moment that there was a bug broadcasting to the neighborhood in that room as he threatened to kill his wife. And it's a good thing he didn't remember that. But it's a good point for all of us to remember in general. So we are here to talk about unintentional radio emissions, the ones that it doesn't say on the box it is doing. And spoiler alert. Every device that you own is screaming its name into the infinite void on invisible magical ethereal waves. And the whole slide show doesn't have an animated background, I promise. So I'm a bad idea. My other name is Melissa. I work at Veracode doing binary analysis. I'm accused of destroying InfoSec because I bring too much pink and glitter to it. But I don't actually have pink hair in real life. Several people have told me I should remedy this. So what are we actually talking about? We're talking about how you, without any formal training or expensive equipment, can learn how to check what sort of noise your devices are generating. generating. Radio emissions, they're magic. If you actually need to know how they work, talk to a physicist. I'm an engineer. But all of your electronics are naturally generating them. They're everywhere. They are filling the air. There are people who believe that they infiltrate their head and tell them to do bad things. That's an open question of science. Fortunately, we have an area in West Virginia reserved for them. The radio silence zone, there is no cell phone towers. There is no FM music station. There is nothing. It is a horrible place for a teenage girl to be. It's where I went to learn about radio astronomy. I'll talk about that later. But let me tell you, 48 hours straight with no access to the Internet at all. And the radio silence zone is an incredibly dangerous place. It is very sensitive. It's These are the devices we're going to be using. You can get these for as little as $10 and, yes, it runs on Linux, yes, it runs on Raspberry Pi. They are radios that have a wide tuning range and they dump the raw signal to software so you can process it. And you really, really don't need to know anything about radio engineering. I realized a few months ago I had become a radio engineering script kiddy. I was like, wow, I don't know anything ‑‑ well, I know a little bit about radio science, just like script kiddies know a little bit about computers, but you have $10, you will in order from China. If you're not, do you have $20? And there are Python bindings. I wrote a script. It's really easy. Anyone with basic technical knowledge can get into this. And the chipset that I would recommend, it's called the RTL2832U, whatever, the RTL SDR. SDR stands for software defined radio. And they are mass produced for tuning into television in various countries, which is why they have such a broad tuning range. They have no intelligence on the chip. That's why they're $10. And you have to use software to make something of the signal. And if there's anyone who has a problem. If you have a problem with the word radio dongle, I'm sorry, I'm going to be saying dongle several times. There is ‑‑ These are what they look like on the inside. They are very simple. They are very easy to fry. May my first one rest in peace. It met its demise when I plugged it into an Android tablet. After reading that you should use a powered USB hub, I can't remember what it was called. between it and the radio because it doesn't have enough power. I said, what can go wrong? Tried it anyway. It's broken. So there are different models and they have different ranges. But in general they go from around 50, 60 megahertz all the way up to like 2.2 gigahertz. So this is a huge range and a huge value for a $10 radio that even a couple years ago this would not have been accessible without quite an investment. And the website you can bulk order them from is called Ali Express. It's a little bit shady but I've gotten all my packages so far. And they have a PAL female connector, by the way. Not very common in the States but your radio shack should carry connectors if you want to plug in your bunny ears like grandma used to have. And why do we care? Well, I think the NSA might care. You have heard of Tempest? That's real. Some people think it's not real. They have been doing this for decades. This is courtesy one Mr. Snowden. You might have heard of him. It says communications and other information that's not communications such as equipment emanations, maybe they have a secret different meaning they seem to for every other word but I think that sounds like radio emissions of devices. It sounds like they're storing them. If anyone in the NSA would like to tell me differently I would be very glad to discuss that with them. And another common misconception is that Tempest only applies to CRT screens. Not true. That's the famous demo, tuning into someone's CRT, seeing everything. The first example of Tempest was a teletypewriter. A typewriter. They could recover the data. They could recover the letters of what was being typed from across the street. You could do this. In 2009, these, I cannot pronounce French names. Please forgive me. They release the Eavesdropping on USB keyboards and wireless keyboards getting full plain text recovery from across the office building. So this is real. This is an actual problem. It's not purely theoretical. porta Forget all the bad stuff. I think if they were talking about that this is a bunch of useless ezpz swishers. that. You deserve to be able to evaluate your devices for how susceptible they are to it. And this is a lot of fun for $10. And you probably aren't breaking any laws, maybe. So about that. There are a lot of laws about radio tuners. They vary from place to place. There are basically arbitrary limitations on certain frequencies if you want to check them out. Fortunately, just tuning into things that's mostly passive and mostly difficult to detect, that URL if you want to check out the slides afterwards goes to some graduate students detecting passive tuners. So they're not entirely passive at all. But, you know, play it safe. Obey all laws. For example, one that applies here in America. Scanning receivers and frequency converters designed or marketed for use with scanning receivers. She'll be in case you need it. She'll be in case you need it. She'll be in case you are incapable of. And it goes on for several paragraphs. And it basically says do not tune to areas reserved for cell phones unless you are an actual cell phone. So don't do this. Do not type the number 824 and hit enter. You have a lot of fans. Get back in there. So we understand it's your first time speaking at DEF CON. Is this true? How would you like your Jack Daniels? I'm afraid I cannot drink, sir. All right. Somebody's coming. My husband. Wait. Is your husband in the audience? Right there. And do you drink, sir? Get your butt up here, then. I see. I see. Been to the DEF CON before. Oh, your first DEF CON? Yes. All right. Well, you'd have to do a double because you're both, you know, self. Oh, that's fine. All right. Oh, I missed one. Oh, by the way, we have decided to brand this little exercise. You've heard of Spot the Fed? This is Shot the Noob. . There will be T-shirts next year. To everybody who's new at DEF CON. Cheers. Cheers. Have a nice talk. Thank you, sir. I was afraid I was going to get vanned there for a second. I swear, that's just a gif. I drew it by hand. I knew it was going to be a gif. never actually type that number in. But no one has ever actually gone to jail for anchoring an integer, right? It doesn't happen. We're safe. So I managed to go most of my life not knowing that my electronics were all leaking all of this signal that details what they're getting up to in their private little electronic lives. The reason I found out is because I went to play with this. This is the Green Bank telescope. It is considered the largest mobile object in the world. Ships don't count because they get the float. It is the size of a football field. It tilts from horizon to horizon, rotates all the way around. They use it to listen to outer space. So the truth is they only let me play with the 40‑foot dish. But I bet none of you have a 40‑foot dish. So what I learned while I was there is that their biggest challenge to getting the science done is the very electronics that they need to measure and process the signal. Because those same electronics blast the signal out of the sky. Just to give you an idea, they had to get a special budget approval to have a microwave oven. They have a microwave oven, which is a Faraday cage, inside another Faraday cage, inside another room, which is also a Faraday cage. That is how much they had to shield things just so they could reheat their pizza at 2 a.m. And they have an entire copper room. And it's very creepy. I was with a girl who had a panic attack because it feels like you're being locked away forever. You open the door, you go in, there's another door, and you're sealed in this copper room. It's just ‑‑ and you're sealing the floor all around, all copper, and everything is self‑contained. Yeah. I couldn't blame her but ‑‑ And speaking of noisy electronics, that I have brought my little friend. If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen it before. This is the $50 netbook from China which I caught on fire. . We will not discuss how it caught fire. It's not relevant. However, what's relevant is that it has no shielding. I'm pretty sure that this violates FCC from rule one to the last. They'd have a conniption if they knew I imported it. And this is the part where we get to the live demo and Fred is not going to turn on his hack RF. So I'm going to tune to an FM radio station. Let's see. Let's see what's here in Vegas. I don't want that too loud on you. So that's what music looks like. I have no idea what I just tuned into. Oh, no. What are those blue lines? So do you see all those little spikes that weren't there like a minute ago? I was afraid that the contrast might not be very good, but there are lots of spikes that weren't there until I turned this on. And how's that? Those, if you zoom in, there is lots of natural jitter, but they are between 32 and 33 kilohertz apart. Does anyone know about anything? Anything that has a clock speed? How about an actual clock? So a realtime clock ‑‑ sorry. A realtime clock has a frequency usually of about 32.768. Good round number. Oh, and I had to screenshot all of this because I was convinced I was going to set it on fire again, which didn't happen. However, I'm afraid the charger isn't working anymore as of about an hour ago when I plugged it into a strip I found lying around DEF CON. So this may be the terrible laptop's last stand. So there's ‑‑ oh. It's very zoomed in and not dancing around. So the realtime clock, that's probably what I'm picking up, and it just blasts its existence all over my FM radio stations. So okay. It has a realtime clock. That's amazing. Everything does. How about something a little more interesting? How do you look for interesting things your electronics are giving off? It's mostly guesswork. And it goes like this. A good place to start is by randomly multiplying numbers together which worked out really well. So the screen on this little thing is a stunning 800 by 480. Pixels, you know, there are three bytes, eight bits, so that's 24 bits per pixel. They're being conveyed on a ribbon cable inside. If you add all those numbers up, you get about 9 megahertz. That's a little bit below. That's below what my radio could tune to, so I couldn't tune to see if there was anything there. And then ‑‑ but there's another factor, and that's the refresh rate. Come on. I don't actually know this thing's refresh rate. Windows CE6, that is what this runs, does not report the refresh rate. It's pirate edition, by the way, I'm pretty sure. But I don't think I've ever seen an LCD lower than 60 or higher. Higher than 75. So that gives us, you know, a range of about 150 megahertz to sift through. There are actually several places I can pick up the signal I'm going to show you, but I'm going to show you the one that I think is best. Let's see. Okay. Does that look like something? I'm logging in. I'm sure it's really secure. Okay. Oh, did it change? Unfortunately, this doesn't have a display port, so you're going to have to trust me. It was a very bland login screen, and now it has a very lovely Pokemon wallpaper. And you'll see the color change because I have a very, very small antenna. It's the free one that came with my radio. So I'm sure the people you actually need to worry about do not have the free 4‑inch antenna that came with their $10 radio. But I think I'm going to go do some word processing. And the signal actually went very flat. It's mostly gone. I'm going to go open pirate PowerPoint. Okay. Okay. So thank you. I do have other antennas. Okay. All right. All right, I'll use it. You gave me one with a loose connector. Actually all the PAL female connectors are just all ‑‑ don't stay together. Good enough. But I have the word processor open. It's not very exciting. Mostly white screen. And this thing is slow as heck. So office, presentation. Yes, I would like to restore this. I may have cut the power. And gee, that looks different. I have a nice checkerboard effect going on on my PowerPoint. Okay. And now it's black because it's loading and the signal mostly goes away. And a presentation. You cheated me. So the touchpad on this thing is very treacherous. So treacherous in fact that it ruined one of my demos. I had found a frequency where you could hear the touchpad when you touch it. It goes bzz, bzz, bzz. Everything worked. Then I get here to Las Vegas and I double check. It's gone. I have no idea. I'm going to chalk it up to it being so dry. That's what seems to be the excuse for everything. And so now the full screen is that checkerboard pattern and the signal has broken down into very discreet lines. Now. Okay. Can you recover the screen from this? I'm pretty sure you can. Unfortunately my radio sample rate is not very high. But again, I have a $10 radio. So there's my backup. What we're actually seeing is the signal transitions on the cable that feeds the screen. I took this to one of my engineer coworkers at work. He's like, okay, how would you explain this? And he's like, oh, you're seeing when you get zeros and ones. That's why when the signal is all one color, your signal practically goes away, especially like black. It's zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, very exciting. And so very specific patterns will create very noticeable signal patterns. Oh, the screen went off, by the way. It's still there when the screen is off as long as the computer is on because I'm reading the cable that feeds to the LCD. Okay. Cool. And this was my best attempt at actually reconstructing the screen. Does that look like a checkerboard? I think it looks like a checkerboard. So that was the best I could manage with my toy radio. Wrote a Python script. Wrote out to their plotting API. Maybe I'm doing it all wrong. But it's fine. So if the NSA is here, I'd like to file a FOIA request for their algorithms for reconstructing screens. I'm sure they've already figured all this out. So as I said, it's not just screens. It's ‑‑ I've picked up touch screen capacitive fields which have decided to stop working in Vegas. You can pick up physical button presses like the keyboards that those gentlemen were scanning I showed you earlier. The color of lights. The color of lights. So you have green light, red light on your secret machine that's locked away, yeah, don't do that. Microphones obviously, especially wireless ones. When I was at the Source Boston conference, I was running around recording people from across the building and then surprising them. They were like, you weren't in my talk. How did you get that? I don't know. Yeah. You can sometimes pick up RAM. So when I figured out I could see RAM, I hooked the antenna around my neck and went around the office, popped into offices with all this equipment hanging off my neck, like, excuse me, sir, can you tell me what model of MacBook that is? Like, it's last year's, like, oh, is it this one? Yeah. Like, hang on. Tune in to my radio and I see the little grid of lines right where it's expected to be. Thank you. Leave. Like, what is she doing? So basically you can pick up everything to some extent. So that's what RAM looks like. It just makes a very pretty grid. So like this tablet that I'm presenting on, it has 1600 megahertz RAM. And I couldn't find it at 1600 megahertz and I was confused and then I found it at 800 megahertz. I'm like, oh. I guess that's because it's dual channel. And I've had some people explain to me what that actually means because I hadn't actually thought about RAM since about I think 2003 was the last time I actually put RAM into a computer. All of the ones I've bought since then have been tablets. I know, right? So this one is interesting. Because I don't actually know what's being picked up. This is my MacBook Air opening Chrome from when it hasn't been already opened and is in RAM. And it has like a zillion tabs. And I get these very interesting splurts from across the room. Splurts being the technical term. So across the room with my little 4‑inch antenna I can pick up that my MacBook Air was opening Chrome. I'm like, well, it must be the processor. And I ran a benchmark stress test the processor. Didn't get it. It must be the hard drive loading all the cached files. So I open big files, don't get it. So I don't actually know what's causing it. But it's there. This is a microphone. I don't remember who this is. It might even be in this room now. But this was someone talking at Source Boston. When I say there was informed consent, I mean everyone knew I was up to something. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . contain, I was not violating Massachusetts wiretapping laws. When I accidentally tuned into the Blue Man Group, that was an accident. This is my iPhone when I'm connecting to Twitter, I was able to find this telltale signal. I tried to reproduce it here, but for some reason the network here is really unstable. And then here's another view, not far from it, a few megahertz up of my phone. I turned off the wireless so it's forced to 3G, connect to Twitter and then for exactly the duration that little spinny icon was on my phone, this was on the air. So I could see when, you know, in a moment, an iPhone was actually downloading data. Now, hopefully my 3G connection to Verizon is encrypted. If not, we need to talk. But even if it's encrypted, I can still see that it's happening. I can still see, oh, there's someone connecting over Verizon from a cell phone. So different types of devices can be profiled for their activity and then after you know exactly what they do, you can detect them. You can see them through walls and you can triangulate them in 3D space, almost like they're radio transmitters that you're carrying because they are. So it's trivial to distinguish when one of these machines is idle and when it's active. If you carefully study it, you can distinguish between different kinds of active states. An advanced adversary can probably very finely distinguish between active states. So what I've been carrying around the convention, an iPhone 4S, a Nexus 7, a Nintendo 3DS, a MacBook Air, do you think anyone else here has exactly that combination of gadgets? If you do, we should probably be friends. So if someone knew exactly what my brand preferences are, and they could pinpoint me in the crowd if they had all the equipment set up ahead of time, which is, again, we're talking about the adversary. The NSA. I mean China. So even if I turn off Wi‑Fi and Bluetooth, this is still possible. They say, oh, turn off Bluetooth so they can't see your phone. It helps. You're no longer screaming at the top of your lungs that your phone is there. But you're still saying, my phone is here. My phone is definitely here. And this has been proven. It has been proven to work in the real world. Now, this uses Wi‑Fi because that's the same across all devices. It's a standard, and it's loud and reliable. This screenshot is of a system tracking people as they move through a store by following the Wi‑Fi beacons that their phones are giving off. So the camera can correlate to the person by their phone's Wi‑Fi signal. And this is ‑‑ you may have heard on the news Nordstrom trialed this. People actually found it kind of creepy when they found out, and they stopped. But it's implemented. It works. HOST 122 Oh, they said they'd stop. Gosh. That's what I get for trusting them. So this is why the paranoid types are like, take out the battery. Take out the battery because they're worried about this sort of thing. So I'm going to take out the battery on my iPhone. My iPhone doesn't have a removable battery. So what I can do is make like a shoplifter and get some booster bags. Not suspicious at all. You can find them on the Internet labeled as cell phone blockers or some of them call them like cell phone etiquette wrappers because your cell phone won't ring during dinner. You can use tin foil, but I found that grocery store tin foil, I had to wrap it around like six or seven times before my iPhone even lost its wireless signal. So I would recommend actually getting this stuff advertised for blocking this stuff. And then I will show you you can use these radios to actually test that it's working and that they didn't just sell you shiny cloth. Okay. So what can you do? You need to have a completely private talk. Empty everyone's pockets and put everything in your microwave oven. Do not run it. And close the door. A microwave oven is not 100% effective, but it makes a pretty good difference considering it's 40 bucks and you already have one or two. Or three. But they're only rated to shield you from certain frequencies enough so that it's not dangerous. However, it works pretty well. If you put an FM radio in and close the door, you should lose your signal and not hear whatever that music was we were hearing. And snipping off the cable off the back of a microwave should improve its Faraday page properties slightly. I did not want to ruin my microwave and go get another one, so I did not actually test this. But it should work. But I did learn if you want to put a device in a Faraday cage and then run a cable out, either for power or for Internet, keep that cable as short as possible. So when I first heard, oh, I want to go test my microwave and make sure it actually works, I put my radio in there and closed the door and the signal just barely drops a little bit. I'm like, this barely works at all. And then I finally realized I had a six‑foot USB cable dangling out of the microwave oven. And it's a shielded cable. It says so on the wrapper. But I could still pick up my local radio stations loud and clear inside a Faraday cage because I had a six‑foot cable on the outside feeding into it. I wrapped it all up and moved the microwave closer to my computer so that it was now like six inches. It was outside and the rest was inside. And suddenly I lost the signal. So that was how I learned, yeah, those wires dangling out of a cage, they're antennas. And also when something says it's shielded, it means it's shielded enough not to break, not shielded enough not to pick up your local music station. So you can use even these $10 SDRs to check. Like, okay, I'm going to use this. Okay. Is this Faraday wrapper for my phone actually working? Is my phone giving off weird signals? I wrote a Python script to scan through a range and look for signals that I ran when it was in the Faraday cage. I think I could improve it quite a bit. Someone who knows a lot more about radio could improve it quite a bit. How am I doing on time? Okay. Great. And in the process, you will learn that there are trillions of devices brought into the world broadcasting weird things in your neighborhood. And you will start to lose sleep over them. What is that thing that goes beep, beep every three minutes? I don't know. So this is what my highly scientific set up looked like. It says science station right on it, it's legit. So you know, it's a microwave oven, a computer, and as little USB cable as possible. And if you're using Windows, I recommend you use the interactive program called SDR sharp for this. For Macintosh and Linux, GQRX, I don't know what that stands for, if anything. The first one is probably GNU. After that, I'm lost. And these are based on the command line utilities, the RTL SDR library. And you can use this utility. You can use these utilities directly or write things that use them. And they have pretty simple Python bindings that I was very pleased with. These links are all in the CD. I assume they are. I don't actually own a computer with a CD drive for about five years now. So what else can you do? Well, the U.S. government has helpfully compiled its guidelines for being resistant to this. And you can find them on Wikipedia. Okay. There's also the French and the German have their own guidelines, if you want to compare. But their key takeaway is correlated emissions are bad. Correlated emissions means it changes when something on the machine changes. That leaks information. You don't want that. So ask your landlady about copper plating for your bedroom. I'm sure it will go over really well. So my co‑worker said I had to throw in. This story relating to LEDs. Will this play? Oh, come on. No. Go back. So that's supposed to be a movie that shows the lights changing color at work. We have a rainbow tree that someone made. It's a metal tree that has all these LEDs in it and it's powered by Arduino and it goes through these patterns, right? And I like to sit under it at work because it's like your own little private disco. And so shortly after I got my radio and I was delighting and discovering things around the office, I sat under that tree and suddenly my signal was just like and then the rainbow tree changed what pattern it was doing and it was like oh, cool. I can hear what color is on the ‑‑ on the tree is playing by this radio interference. So I'm sitting there with my headphones on like, whoa. Someone comes by, looks at me and they're like, what are you doing? I go, I'm listening to the radio. This is a tree. I can hear the colors. She's finally cracked. We always knew she would. She's cracked. And so if this hasn't left you feeling a little more paranoid, I don't know what else I can say to scare you. So if security researchers all seem a bit twitchy, this is why. Because we think about this stuff at 3 in the morning like, oh, no, what if they come for me? I accidentally tuned into the Blue Man Groups and radio and that might have violated Massachusetts wiretapping law and they're going to find me. It was really creepy, by the way, when I accidentally tuned into their performance group, I tuned into their walkie talkies and I didn't know who I had found at first. All I heard was, oh, there's a guy. I was like, all right, Nancy, now stand there, get down on your knees and hold that position. What did I just hear? And then I figured out I was hearing their lighting group practicing, you know, like, we need dramatic lighting at this spot so go stand there and hold that position for only five minutes. I was like, oh, okay. Okay. And I'm not even positive it was the Blue Man Group. I could see their big sign. line from the window, so that's probably who I accidentally tuned into. So as another reminder, walkie talkies, radios, wireless phones, baby monitors, those are all in the clear. Police radio usually in the clear. I heard some interesting things here the other night. That's not surprising at all. But those are all intentional emissions, they're supposed to do that and people don't even remember that they're doing that. So people are not going to remember that their devices are leaking all this information. Journalists should take note, whistle blowers should take note, all of you innocent people who never do anything illegal should take note. And you can take steps, very simple steps, wrap it in the foil, take these $10 radios and give it a spin, see what you can find, and you might even find something really interesting on a really good device that's effectively zero day, you know? Someone down the street can get information leakage out of this device. Do we do CVEs for that? I don't even know. And I have brought with me a few of these radios because I got a whole crate of them from China for a hundred bucks and I don't plan on frying all of them so I figured I should give a few away. I'll give one to the first person who comes up to me and tells me what my favorite color is. And I hear all of you shouting the wrong one. Who said orange? I did. Okay. Orange. Larry Cash dollar, I know you, that's cheating. Orange. But I'm probably going to head across to the Q and A room if I can figure out where that is. I almost didn't find the speaker room earlier. I'm very good with maps. And maybe if you come and say something intelligent. And find something. Thought provoking. I will give you one of my radios. Thank you.