Innovative Method for TEMPEST Detection and Identification of Compromising Emission Generated by The Video Signal from a Laptop

In the TEMPEST evaluation process, detecting the compromising emission is achieved by reconstructing and identifying the reference signal from the received RF emission. Thus, for video signal detection, the reconstruction of the monitor image consists of rasterizing the video signal and visually correlating it with the reference image by an expert. In our paper, we present a developed and tested method for detecting and identifying compromising emissions generated by a laptop monitor, which consists of modulating the test image with a reference audio signal, performing audio correlation of the demodulated signal from the received emission with the reference signal, and quantifying the quality of the reconstructed audio signal. The advantages of the developed method include the use of commercial EMC measurement equipment, processing of narrowband signals, and eliminating the need for sophisticated rasterization software applications.