HDMI and AI: Experts Reveal a New Way to Steal Data

All it takes for cybercriminals to steal your confidential data is an HDMI interface and artificial intelligence. At least, that’s what a report from specialists at the University of the Republic in Uruguay suggests.

According to a study published on arXiv, the researchers managed to extract test data by scanning electromagnetic emissions. The experimental setup included the following components:

• Antenna
• RF filters and amplifier
• SDR (Software Defined Radio)
• A computer acting as the attacker, running a GNU Radio block diagram

For hardware, the experts used an Intel Core i7-10700F processor, 64 GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU with 24 GB of memory. Using this setup, the team captured electromagnetic emissions from an HDMI cable connected to the target computer. Artificial intelligence was then used to analyze and decode the captured data.

While entering passwords on the target device, the researchers attempted to intercept and decrypt them using AI. The report also includes examples of the recovered combinations using gr-tempest (top), Pure Model (center), and the original image (bottom).

The experts provided a performance table for the models used, evaluated on both synthetic and real images. The best results are highlighted in bold.