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Oh god, this guy again. The title is misleading clickbait, as is the case with every recent article about his papers. This isn't revealing "Ethernet cable traf
by marcan_42 5y ago
Oh god, this guy again. The title is misleading clickbait, as is the case with every recent article about his papers.
This isn't revealing "Ethernet cable traffic contents". This is using crafted data over the wire to produce specific measurable (low bandwidth) RF emissions that can be picked up externally. It's obvious that this would work, and doing a proof of concept is a weekend project for anyone with an SDR.
Just like that "RAM as WiFi transmitter" (not really WiFi, just radio noise) and the previous one with GSM (same story) and all his other covert channel papers, this is completely boring stuff that requires malware on the sending side to leak data. His papers are superficial and he never attempts to measure maximum practical channel bandwidths, or do any other useful science. He's literally getting hundreds of times lower bandwidth than what would be theoretically possible with his approaches, because he doesn't actually know how to use proper encoding schemes or optimize his receiver/demodulator. It's all extremely low effort.
Every time he just comes up with a random idea of "something that can be measured externally from a computer", from spurious radio emissions to temperature to LEDs, then makes the minimum viable PoC to encode data over it and measure it externally, and cranks out a paper. Every single time. He's running a paper mill, nothing more. None of this is useful research, anyone can come up with his ideas and test them in a few hours. And he's really good at getting a news cycle out of it through misleading clickbait titles; he's really taken a liking to that recently.
All this air-gap jumping nonsense he describes only applies if you already have malware inside your air-gap. And if you do, well, the only way you're going to be able to stop leakage is to put the tainted computer in a concrete bunker surrounded by a Faraday cage and running off of isolated batteries. This isn't news.
FWIW, his clickbait theme was one of the things that inspired me to release https://M1RACLES.com https://M1RACLES.com the way I did. It's sad seeing real infosec issues getting mixed in with irrelevant clickbaited stuff that nobody cares about. And it works; a whole bunch of news sites didn't even bother to read past the first page of that site....
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- b112 5y agoMaybe he's looking for a US O-1 VISA, eg, showing extraordinary this and that. One of the qualifying points is published stuff. I see sooooo many blogs from India, and this may be another reason why. Publish.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoThis sounds so correct. I feel stupid for not having connected the dots before.
- hutrdvnj 5y agoYeah, but it's not that he is acting wrong, he is just one particular example out of millions. It's the scientific system as a whole that has gone wrong. We have to find ways to fix it in such a way that it doesn't force researchers to crank out a massive amount of low quality publications.
- oolonthegreat 5y agoI thought the idea was to get data out/transmit out of an "infected" computer when it has no public network access: and not actually sniffing normal traffic. so it assumes a compromised air-gapped computer, is that not a concern of infosec? is that a purely theoretical scenario that won't happen ? why?
- marcan_42 5y agoIf you're at the level where that is a concern, you should be putting your air-gapped computers inside a bunker. This should be obvious to anyone doing threat modeling at this level. It is clear that there are a myriad ways of modulating data in environmental emissions out of a computer; we don't need a new paper from this guy for every single light, RF, sound, and heat emitting component in a computer. We know. I can come up with as many of these as you want. Last time I talked about this I came up with a dozen or so, and after checking he'd done them all, except one: the camera LED. So I wrote a 5-minute tweet-sized PoC to modulate data using the camera LED. That would've been on par with his papers. If he actually did real science e.g. trying to estimate maximum theoretical data transfer rates with these techniques then his research would be valuable, but he isn't. He's just doing minimal proofs of concept. We all know these things work. Tempest for Eliza has been around for 20 years now and was a cooler demo than anything this guy has put out [1]. [1] http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/ http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/