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Etherify: Transmitting Morse Code via Raspberry Pi Ethernet RF Leakage

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Over on his blog SQ5BPF has been documenting a TEMPEST experiment where he's been able to transmit data via RF being leaked from a Raspberry Pi's Ethernet connection. The idea was born when he found that his Raspberry Pi 4 was leaking a strong RF signal at 125 MHz from the Ethernet cable. He went on to find that it was easy to turn a tone on and off simply changing the Ethernet link speed with the "ethtool" command line tool. Once this was known it is a simple matter of creating a bash script to generate some morse code.

Quite amazingly the Ethernet RF leakage is very strong. With the Raspberry Pi 10 meters away, and a steel reinforced concrete wall in between, SQ5BPF was able to receive the generated morse code via an RTL-SDR connected to a PC. Further experiments show that with a Yagi antenna he was able to receive the signal from 100 meters away.

His post explains some further experiments with data bursting, and provides links to the scripts he created, so you can try this at home.

Update - SQ5BPF also notes the following:

The leakage differs a lot with the hardware used. The Raspberry Pi 4 is exceptional and also allows to switch the link speed quickly, so was a nice candidate for a demo, but other hardware works as well.

The first tests were done on some old laptops I had laying around, and they leak as well. Maybe someday I will publish this, but everyone of them behaves differently.

Etherify 1 demo receiving via SDR and decoding via fldigi

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