A Quantitative Analysis of Compromising Emanation from HDMI and Possibility of Information Reconstruction

This paper presents the electromagnetic interference characteristics of the high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI), a well-known display interface, and quantitatively offers the possibility of information from the leakage in the perspective of radio communication. After analyzing the leakage characteristics, a pseudo-signal model is generated based on the characteristics and behavioral features of the software-defined radio. Subsequently, the model is utilized to investigate the performance of frame-averaging to improve the low signal-to-noise ratio of sensitive information contained in the leakage. In addition, the frame-averaging scheme is quantitatively analyzed under various environmental assumptions. Based on these contributions, the paper offers several indexes that quantitatively present meaningful information in EM leakage. Finally, the actual measurement results are compared with those of the pseudo-model to verify our work.