3 ms·
Very inventive method of breaching the air and audio gaps. I wonder if exploits like this might encourage the use of fanless computers in these ultra-secure lo
by tinbucket 10y ago
Very inventive method of breaching the air and audio gaps.
I wonder if exploits like this might encourage the use of fanless computers in these ultra-secure locations? There are quite a few processors on the market now which give decent performance without the need for a fan.
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoOr hardware-lock the fans at maximum speed, if you need more power.
- steventhedev 10y agoAt which point they'd find out how to manipulate specific capacitors on the board to emit noise. Did you ever hold a cheap backlit wristwatch up to your ear as a kid? That sound. Perhaps a cheaper way to solve this is to hide the physical case inside a locked cabinet, with a ventilation fan? Most users of secure systems don't need physical access to the case, and the ventilator should drown out any signal noise from such malware.
- tinbucket 10y agoFair point. I suppose it's about eliminating as many vulnerabilities and exploit vectors as possible, then deploying countermeasures and controls to mitigate the ones you can't remove. Putting a fanless machine inside a closed cabinet with a relatively noisy fan, or at least one with a large frequency spread, would go some way towards accomplishing that.
- caf 10y agoThe "adding noise" method is not, in general, effective. You can always do something like spread-spectrum modulation of the transmitted signal to recover it from below the noise floor.
- Retr0spectrum 10y agoI saw a similar article where temperature was used to transmit information. Of course, it was very low bitrate, but it worked. Perhaps a solution would be to design a CPU where every instruction consumes exactly the same ammount of power.