3 ms·
Unfortunately those were immediately susceptible to tempest attacks, at least at old hard drive speeds.
by robin_reala 7y ago
Unfortunately those were immediately susceptible to tempest attacks, at least at old hard drive speeds.
- angry_octet 7y agoI think you are confusing this with data tx/rx lights for exfil[0]? I've never heard of a tempest attack (that is, revealing the data written via a side channel) on a hard drive light. [0] Guri et al, LED-it-GO https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.06715.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.06715.pdf
- robin_reala 7y agoI think it’s this paper I remember that describes it as an “optical tempest” and talks about storage mechanism leakage: http://applied-math.org/acm_optical_tempest.pdf http://applied-math.org/acm_optical_tempest.pdf
- angry_octet 7y agoYeah it's type II in the Loughry schema. Still unfortunate if you're operating a high security air gapped network, but not squirting out secrets without being compromised first. It seems almost quaint to worry about this when so much software has web spyware baked into it -- but maybe we need a virtual spyware led that lights up every time something talks to Facebook/Google/etc tracking. The light would be blinking non-stop for many people.