The government has found no evidence to suggest that hackers are using HDMI cables to steal user passwords, minister of electronics and information technology Jitin Prasada informed the Rajya Sabha in a written response on Friday.
He did, however, acknowledge that the government was aware of different cybersecurity threats, including those using artificial intelligence (AI), for which the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) had also issued an advisory in May 2023.
Prasada was responding to a specific question asked by NCP (SP) MP Fauzia Khan about whether the government was aware that hackers could use HDMI cables to steal user passwords. Khan was ostensibly referring to a July 2024 research paper published by three scientists from the University of the Republic (Uruguay) on Cornell University’s ArXiv service.
According to this paper, the electromagnetic radiation can be collected using an antenna and then routed through a text recognition software (an AI model trained to interpret this radiation) to decode what is displayed on a screen, including passwords and other sensitive information. The scientists wrote that it could be done even without physical access to the target computer.