Recovering Crypto Keys From Smartphones Externally

A couple of weeks ago I was writing about how researchers were able to recover crypto keys (through walls no less) using the electromagnetic emanations from laptops.  These forms of side channel attacks are proving to be particularly effective.  Then yesterday saw two papers appear both of which showed how similar techniques could be applied to smartphones.

The first paper was from the same team about whose research I wrote previously.  This time instead of placing the antenna on the other side of a wall, they taped it to the underside of a table to show that by simply placing your phone on the table your encryption key could be recovered.  The technique used to recover the key was very similar to that used previously.

Experimental setup used in paper by Tromer et al