4 ms·
This is brilliant - magnetic TEMPEST. Though magnetic field intensity drops off with an inverse cute law, they mention that in the paper, which restricts the d
by rdtsc 9y ago
This is brilliant - magnetic TEMPEST.
Though magnetic field intensity drops off with an inverse cute law, they mention that in the paper, which restricts the distance. It seems they got up to 100cm but it's 1bps at that point. For 10bps need to be only about 10cm way. Seems hard to exploit but imagine server being next to a wall/floor and someone placing a bug right next to the wall on the other side.
Seems just leaving enough space around the server would be enough. Put it 1m away from floor and walls and it should mitigate it.
I knew about the light and ultrasound before, but also learned from the paper there is apparently a thermal TEMPEST attack as well.
- schoen 9y agoKragen Sitaker's post that was featured on HN recently mentioned the idea of simply slowing down communications to increase distance without increasing power. Can that be demonstrated for air gap penetrating malware (with or without electrical shielding)? Can I run software on my computer that successfully sends a message wirelessly to Kragen over on another continent (albeit at some absurdly low data rate)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16232509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16232509
- cperciva 9y agoI realize it was a typo, but I love the idea of an "inverse cute law".
- schoen 9y agoSame here, but I expect it's the wrong law for magnetism. People's magnetism is roughly proportional to the logarithm of their cuteness, isn't it?
- rdtsc 9y agoHa! Silly typo. Thanks for pointing it out. "Inverse cute law" works as you said as well, it's when you're trying to exfiltrate data but physics conspires against you.
- dboreham 9y agoI thought it had something to do with Schrodinger's Cat.
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoCompletely isolated systems seem more and more like a theoretical abstraction, not a reality. If you want true isolation, place it inside the event horizon of a black hole. Or spin up a child universe then cut off the connection. Even then some clever cookie might find ways for information to percolate from one continuum to another.
- schoen 9y ago> If you want true isolation, place it inside the event horizon of a black hole. There's a hypothesis supported by some physicists that black holes in some way export the information content of the things they previously swallowed via Hawking radiation. Hawking himself apparently has not endorsed this interpretation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox#Hawking_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox...
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoRight. Well, at least you might kick the can down the road for a couple trillion years before the stuff leaks out. Ought to be good enough in most cases.
- knodi123 9y ago> Or spin up a child universe then cut off the connection. Unfortunately, even that doesn't always work; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_changes_during_Infinite_Crisis#Superboy-Prime's_changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_changes_during_Infi...