Technique gets clear images from light reflected off blank paper

arstechnica.com

34 points·acro··8 comments

Totally different concept, but this reminds me of the anecdotes my professor would tell us about the possibility of eavesdropping on a monitor (CRT then) based on the light radiation emitted, and not from seeing the actual image itself

Maybe he was talking about project TEMPEST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST

I don't have a link to the paper, but I recall reading a whitepaper about it as far back as 2002.

You're thinking of Optical Time-Domain Eavesdropping Risks of CRT Displays by Markus G. Kuhn in Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Berkeley, California, 12–15 May 2002.

Available here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ieee02-optical.pdf

Pretty amazing that this actually works, just using a high-speed photo-sensor – and doesn't even require line of sight, a reflection off a wall is enough. Unfortunately, I don't think it will work on LCD screens.

Article describing novel way to produce images, yet no images produced in article.

Further investigation finds a few thumbnails an a paywall.

I grabbed the images from the PDF paper and put them here:

Figure 1: http://i.imgur.com/imfvc.png Figure 2: http://i.imgur.com/xKIOv.png Figure 3: http://i.imgur.com/GevEd.png

Interesting stuff!

There's also an article about it on Petapixel: http://www.petapixel.com/2012/07/16/researchers-develop-came...

and the full academic paper is available here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.2078.pdf

At last! Something that comes close to explaining the "seeing around a corner in a scanned picture" scene in Blade Runner...

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