Before you go shorting a USB port to "blow its specific fuse" you might look at the motherboard closely. Given that you can save money by omitting them, you'll find some motherboards do just that. There are also thermal based, self resetting fuses, so the port could come back.<p>If it's that important, fill the hole with epoxy. Thicken it to a peanut butter consistency so it doesn't run all over.
I'm missing something here. If you collect data up to 48kHz, then there are still 100,000 or so instructions occurring in each sample. Getting from there to breaking RSA should have some explaining.
I wonder if the PC they tapped was a single corer? I imagine > 1 core (if > 1 were being used) would muddy the signal somewhat. Also, peripheral device (or even GPU) operations would do the same (muddy the signal) - so I guess like a lot of attacks - they work best when conditions suit their vector.
Is a side channel attack very feasible in a cloud computing setting? Say for the server spaces of places like Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Linode, and other such providers.<p>Also, could this sort of thing be circumvented by doing the encrypting and decrypting inside a virtual environment and then interspersing random computations throughout?