Lend Me Your Ear: Passive Remote Physical Side Channels on PCs

The attacks demonstrated in the paper require a significant amount of prior knowledge and specific circumstances in order to work:

1) The make and model of the target laptop

2) Knowledge of the computational task being executed on the target machine

3) Training data from the target machine

4) Unusual usage patterns by the user

The first two pieces of info can be acquired via surveillance and social engineering, the last two are much harder to achieve.

IMHO in a real world scenario, this leakage path is more usefull as adjunct to a primary attack vector. eg: being able to tell that a change in computational modality has occurred with course insight into the nature of that change