I'm new to encryption and still learning about it; I overheard someone this weekend mentioning that 4096 bit encryption was "cracked" by listening to the CPU and searched for this to confirm it because it sounded a little hard to believe. However, at least if this article is legitimate, it appears to be true.
According to the article, the individual cracking it would need the ability to listen to the CPU that could decrypt the encryption, and it looks like that individual couldn't be too far away either:
The researchers successfully extracted decryption keys over a distance of four meters (13 feet) with a high-quality parabolic microphone. Perhaps more intriguingly, though, they also managed to pull of this attack with a smartphone placed 30 centimeters (12 inches) away from the target laptop. The researchers performed the attack on different laptops and desktops, with varying levels of success. For what it’s worth, the same kind of electrical data can also be divined from many other sources — the power socket on the wall, the remote end of an Ethernet cable, or merely by touching the computer (while measuring your body’s potential relative to the room’s ground potential)
From a security standpoint, are there any safeguards to protect against this outside what the article mentions ("heavy duty security and physical security")? I realize that to a certain degree some people will always try to break encryption, regardless of how many bits it is, but from someone on the protection side of things, what best practices do we have to prevent this type of encryption-hacking from occurring?
I forgot to add: one reason for this concern is that businesses/governments/powers-that-be could put a microphone by a CPU without users being aware so that they could obtain encryption information, and from there it's only a matter of hackers finding ways to get that information, as business/government/powers-that-be data are not always the most secure.
