In a report via Techpowerup, a new concept design has been revealed that is a bit odd, but quite scary in terms of technology and usage!
Using an AMD Radeon PRO WX3100, security researchers Mikhail Davidov and Baron Oldenburg discovered that if the clock speed of the graphics card was manipulated in a certain way, it could be used to effectively turn it into a radio transmitter.
Using the speed of the clock to create an RF frequency, it has been discovered that this method could convert the graphics card into a wireless data transmitter with a range of up to 1.5 meters. This is, by the way, regardless of whether the PC is connected to the Internet or not.
We turned a Radeon GPU's shader clock in to a tunable radio transmitter that can jump through walls & get picked up 50ft away.
Get your Van Eck fill and learn how to find these and other RF side-channels from myself and @baron of @duo_labs!
https://t.co/nTsEpSqahL pic.twitter.com/ElfA0Q8eqI
– Mikhail Davidov (@sirus) April 22, 2020
What do we think of all this?
Before everyone starts to panic, as happened with the news, where they modified the fan speed and thus stole data … well this is more a concept of piracy than a legitimate threat. While modifying frequencies is, of course, easily possible through some overclocking software, UAC generally prevents any outside source from doing so, so the hacker would have to be less than a meter and a half to receive the signal. Oh, and just to clarify, the researchers aren't against AMD in all of this, either. The Radeon PRO WX3100 was one of the cards on hand to show the concept. However, it is a very impressive investigation and frankly, if they did not prove it, I would not have believed it possible!
If you want more information about this design, you can check the website through this link.