WEBVTT

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There are good privacy and security reasons that you might want a personal

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sized Faraday shield. New hacking tools are emerging every day and your ID, your

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car, and even your wallet could be at risk. But, in an industry that is a wash

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with pseudo-science and weapons grade blog damn, are any of these personal

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shields any good? That's the question that this user posed on the LTT [music]

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subreddit. And to answer them correctly, we're going to need a couple of things.

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First, a whole assortment of RF shields.

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Second, this RF meter. And third, a

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controlled environment so that we can ensure that any fluctuations in our

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measurements are due to the actual shield itself and not, say, someone in

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the lab over there downloading a file over the Wi-Fi. That is where our EMC

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chamber from Raymond EMC comes in. This

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bad boy gets us down to functionally zero RF, meaning that, yes, I'm going to

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test Faraday cages inside of an even bigger Faraday cage. We've got several

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popular cages from Amazon and one of our new writers, Danny, also MacGyvered one

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out of common household objects. Now,

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it's time for me to MacGyver this segway out of this cable and these twist ties

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A quick search online will yield a veritable buffet of Faraday shields,

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many of which appear to be quite similar looking and make similar claims. So,

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rather than ordering all of them, we chose a few different types to measure

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their effectiveness with a cell phone as a transmitter and our EMF strength meter

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as a receiver. Let's take a look at our candidates here. This bag here from

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Hadufi is pretty small and kind of flimsy

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feeling, but it's only 10 bucks. Meanwhile, Sam Folk makes this $25 box

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that comes with a free IQ test and also these

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pouches. One is the size for your keys and then the other is the size for your

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phone. So, I guess it's meant to live by the front door of a house where all of

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the calls come in via the landline. Anyway, the Mission Darkness bag is

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double the price of the Sam Folk, but also includes

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two layers of shielding cloth, so it must be twice as good then. Then,

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finally, we've got this RFID blocking wallet from our partners over at Ridge.

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We'll have links to all of the stuff down below. Finally, finally, we picked

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up some bulk shielding fabric from Amradield Amradield Amradield I'm

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rattled by my inability to pronounce this [music] word. The point is this

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will let you make an RFID blocking whatever you want and we will make one

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of those. But, before we do that, we're going to do a basic test on the fabric

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by itself. While we do have a handful of different tools for measuring electric

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fields, we're going to keep things really simple today with our Extech EMF

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meter. You can see that here inside the chamber with the door closed, we're

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sitting at virtually zero. Just

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1917 [music] mV per meter. That is orders of

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magnitude less than just outside these walls. [music] Now, all we got to do is

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position this about 40 cm from our test platform and grab a phone to put on the

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pedestal. We left all our phones outside. Oops. One moment, please.

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First up is the Hadufi bag. Let's start

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by getting a baseline though. Immediately upon bringing a phone in

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here, you can see it's just searching for network, sending [music] out pings

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for other Bluetooth devices, Wi-Fi devices. We're sitting at anywhere from

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around 1 to 2 and 1/2 volts per meter. A

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lot more. However, now that it's kind of gone to sleep, it looks like we're

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closer to around 700 millivolts to 1.2

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up and it spiked up to two again. What is your logic? Pro logic?

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Realistically, anywhere from around 650

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millivolts to [music] 2 and 1/2 volts per meter. Pretty broad,

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but compared to what we saw when the room didn't have an iPhone in it, I

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think we should be able to tell if this is doing anything. First up is the ha

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dufy.

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They were very specific about folding it twice and that actually makes a ton of

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sense because just one fold could leave gaps where the dangerous RF could leak

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out. I'm going to aim [music] to put it in the same spot on the pedestal here

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and let's see what our measurements look like.

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Oh, wow. I don't know exactly what I was

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expecting, but that wasn't it.

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High five ha dufy.

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Left me hanging, but it didn't leave me hanging in terms of performance. This is

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functionally identical to what we had before we brought the iPhone in here.

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Next up Wait, hold on. Before we move on, the ha dufy also claims that it can

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withstand temperatures of up to 1,000°

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F. I assume you like your phone not broken though, so what kind of a claim is that?

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What is this bag for? You never know if in the apocalypse you might need to very

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specifically withstand 1,000° F. Next

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up, we've got our Sam folk box. Oh,

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leaking a little. And good. You really got to close it

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though.

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And we found the same thing in our next couple of tests, meaning that everything

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from the boxes to the bags to the loose

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fabric performed pretty much identically.

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The question now is why though? For wallets and key fobs, the answer is

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pretty [music] obvious to keep your cards from being skimmed and to keep

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your car from being stolen. But so many of these companies market these products

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for cell phone use. They do understand how cell phones work,

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right? Here's a Linus Tech Tip, free of charge. If you're ever tempted to put

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your phone into one of these shields for any extended period of time, just put it

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in airplane mode instead. It offers up the same security benefits, that is to

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say little to none, but it comes with none of the downsides of putting your

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phone inside a Faraday cage. Like people, your phone gets lonely without a

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connection and it will just keep swiping desperately for a wireless hookup until

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finally its social battery is drained and it

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doesn't want to do anything anymore. The Ridge Wallet claims to offer defense

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against RFID card skimmers, but this raises some questions. How can it do so

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if it doesn't even form a complete enclosure around your cards? To find

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out, we're going to need a different test methodology. Because those RFID

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chips are passive, [music] being powered on by the reader through induction

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before they actually transmit any data, we can't just

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poke an EMF meter at it. We're going to have to power up the card first. That

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is where the Flipper Zero comes in. In theory, it's as simple as putting the

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Flipper against the back of the card and it'll power up that chip and grab a

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reading. Just like that. Now, the Flipper is scrambled because it

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doesn't actually try to be a device for theft. But, this is enough to find out

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if the Ridge Wallet will block us.

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It works, which is nice because as a long-time partner, it would have been

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awkward if we had to be the ones to expose that the Ridge Wallet doesn't

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work cuz it doesn't enclose the card. Uh presumably that doesn't matter thanks to

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the extremely low range and low power

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operation of RFID. Now that we validated it, that totally makes sense. I just

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hadn't really thought about it before. So, now my only remaining question is

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do I need any of these off-the-shelf solutions or could I just as easily put

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something together myself? YouTube is chock-full of DIY RF blocking solutions

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with the most common being the old CIA classic, the wrap it before they wiretap

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it with aluminum foil, of course. It's um

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not exactly a durable material, though, is it? That's where this solution comes

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in. >> [music] >> This is a cheap resealable Ziploc bag

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with some metal foil tape in an overlapping pattern. Theoretically, by

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following the same installation process that we did with our other bags, that is

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to say, folding it over and over and

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then putting a little clamp on it, we should

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be able to block any signals in or out.

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While we're at it, I also want to try this cookie tin and how does this hat

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figure into it? Are you just Are you just trying to protect me or what's the

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idea here? Of course. Thanks, Danny.

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This one's not available at lttstore.com, but we do have hats. You

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can check them out at the link below.

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And as we've confirmed before on this channel, tinfoil works, but

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it's not exactly convenient.

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Why don't we try our reusable bag?

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And like the tin foil, it works. Now, let's try something that

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you might already have in your house sitting in your garbage or recycling

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bin. This metal cookie tin should make a perfect shield now that it's empty.

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>> [laughter] >> Anyhow, let's go ahead and put that in there.

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And voila, perfect. You might think, but

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we actually found that the orientation mattered a little bit and the seam,

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well, the seam did have some leakage, but apparently now it doesn't. Since we're

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at it, one final thing we wanted to test was these ESD safe bags that many

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electronics ship in. There are rumors on Reddit that, depending on the type, it

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can block signals for devices inside them.

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I don't actually expect this to work.

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Huh. [laughter] Totally works. It's maybe not quite as

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low as some of the stuff we've seen, but it's pretty much there.

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With that said, I fully expected this kind to do nothing.

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Yeah. That's [music] pretty rough. It might do something, but not much. All of

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which leaves only one thing to test, the bulk fabric. Now, I'm not saying that 5G

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signals are dangerous for your junk. I'm just saying that um

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if you believed that, this underwear might do something.

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You want to check it? There's nothing there. Oh, come now.

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squarespace.com/LTT. If you guys enjoyed this video and you

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want to learn more about RF and how this EMC chamber works, check out the

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unboxing we did. It was very generous of Raymond EMC to provide this chamber so

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that we could bring you guys important tech tips like

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whether this fabric protects your junk from the 5G.