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With enough technical savvy, simply touching a laptop can suffice to extract the cryptographic keys used to secure data stored on it.
The trick is based on the fact that the “ground” electrical potential in many computers fluctuates according to the computation that is being performed by its processor—including the computations that take place when cryptographic software operates to decrypt data using a secret key.
Measuring the electrical potential leaked to your skin when you touch the metal chassis of such laptops, and analyzing that signal using sophisticated software, can be enough to determine the keys stored within, says Eran Tromer, a computer security expert at Tel Aviv University.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530251/how-to-break-cryptography-with-your-bare-hands/
[Paper] http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/handsoff/
(Score: 2) by TK on Friday August 22 2014, @03:15PM
Isn't the dirty mains power handled by the laptop's external power supply? Even if it supplies "dirty" DC power, you could measure that directly and filter it out of your measurement from the laptop.
I'm not saying this will make this job approach feasibility, but it could eliminate one source of noise.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum