Research on extracting secrets from air-gapped computers via RAM radio signals
Academic paper describes a method to leak data from isolated systems through electromagnetic emissions.
What to know
- Research describes a method to extract secrets from air-gapped computers via electromagnetic emissions from RAM
- Air-gapped systems are deliberately isolated from networks; this technique represents a novel side-channel vulnerability
- The paper has circulated on academic and tech community platforms including Hacker News and Mastodon
arXiv Publisher
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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Paper circulates across social platforms
The research spreads to Mastodon and other social networks as security researchers and technologists share and discuss the findings.
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We demonstrated this in 2016 at PennApps and won the hackathon. The demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAM9c3eBFyECode: https://github.com/fyquah/ramearPress: https://technical.ly/software-development/scary-hardware-hac...The most challenging part was to demonstrate it live on stage, typing on the airgapped desktop and decoding the…
2 more of the top 3 · 11 posts in this stretch
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Actually, leaking secrets by air gapped computers is really, really old.I know that e.g. in 1985 the (west) german army had tempest rules e.g. for mobile elint systems. You couldn't use a normal computer for e.g. triangulation, or to look up things in databases. The reason was that even back then video of a normal computers could be monitored from…
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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…
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background
Paper gains traction on Hacker News — The research appears on Hacker News frontpage, receiving initial engagement from the tech community discussing the security implications.
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background
Research on air-gap breach method published — An academic paper titled "Leaking Secrets from Air-Gap Computers by Spelling Radio Signals from RAM" is published on arXiv, detailing a technique to extract data from isolated systems through electromagnetic side-channels.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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first by HN Best, 10d ago · also HN Frontpage
1 more headline
- Leaking Secrets from Air-Gap Computers by Spelling Radio Signals from RAM HN Frontpage · 10d ago
What people are saying 8 voices from 1 site · best of 11 · verbatim
- Nov 1
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I've started to play a meta game when I see new paper on side channels: I try to guess if it's Guri or Elovici this time.
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"At best, an air gap is a high-latency connection." - Ed Skoudis (of SANS fame).
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I used the same approach to play music from a .wav via pulse density modulation -*
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…