Leaking Secrets from Air-Gap Computers by Spelling Radio Signals from RAM (2024)

These and other methods are good reason to believe that AI can never be 100% contained, which gives me pause.

The famous air gap case is stuxnet, but there are other technical and biological approaches.

It’s a very weird reality we’ve found ourselves in if you stop, zoom out about, and really take in the gravity of the issues we are grappling with as a human race. Exciting, truly, and a bit nerve wracking.

Does any information leak along the power line? I remember having some device back in the day that let me create a LAN through my apartment's electric wiring.

I'm wondering if anything ends up back there thru the PSU during normal use of a computer, or if the high frequency components get filtered out.

(Though maybe secure computers do things differently with the power as well?)

Cool paper even if the attack isn't practical, requiring getting the malware on the computer and a SDR antenna within 7 meters with clear line of sight of the affected computer for 100 bits per second (less after applying error correction). Hard to imagine a scenario where you can pull off both of those, but you couldn't plug in a USB, grab the PC, or record the screen directly.

There are tons of ways to make air gappped systems transmit data. They all include the installation of some malware and have become more expensive and less usable over time.

Back in the day with crt screens you could just capture the frequencies transmitted when creating the picture and look at the copy straight away.

No malware. No direct contact. And it worked over rather big distances.

Devices like routers should have firmware in memory that has read-only access. The access should be turned on or off by a physical switch.

This way, if malware gets installed on your router, doing a cold boot will eliminate it. You can have a timer to just cold boot it regularly.

I've suggested this many times. The rationale for not doing it is so the firmware can be remotely updated. Well, that's exactly how malware infects it.

> With a slow transmission rate (t = 10ms), A transmission is maintained at a distance of 700 cm away. With medium transmission rate (t = 5ms), A transmitted is maintained at a distance of 450 cm away and BER of 3%-4%. With a fast transmission rate (t = 1ms), a transmission is maintained at a distance of 300 cm away and BER of 2%-4%.

Coming from a non-EE background, this is the most interesting part to me. 10ms is an eternity in programming perf work, but it's already very constrained in how clear the signal is for reading the transmission. I just find it interesting that we want to do nothing to create a signal. Perhaps this makes it harder to exploit?

Meanwhile my WiFi never works

These attacks are all incredibly impractical and pointless, the bit rate under the most charitable assumptions is pathetically low. But even more, it ignores the most significant risk, which is people. People who can be tricked and subverted, and people systems that can be influenced to become misaligned, or which have procedural holes.

It's much easier to subvert the supply chain for the secure hardware or subvert the authorised system transfers.

As a total layman when it comes to air gapping: Would this not be defeated by putting the computer in a faraday cage?

Let me guess, a paper written by Mordechai Guri?

It's not even a contest anymore, that man is the heavyweight champ of air-gap security.

> We show that malware on a compromised computer

Right… I’m going to stop reading after these words. With malware on the computer you can change the heat signature of the room of you’re bored enough. https://xkcd.com/1172/

Computers used to come in proper full metal cases. Now they don't. Even when you try to find a metal case for a personal build most cases have giant holes in the side (case windows) acting as slot antennas. And plastic case laptop designs are even worse. Radiated emissions are much easier to achieve at useful intensities these days because of it. Sure, before the conductors going in and out radiated somewhat effectively (and still do). But now even core system components inside are just being let emit without any mitigation.

[flagged]