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I worked for a short while in a national lab. They used to call this "air-gap" security. i.e., there would be computers which would have no internet connection
by sheri 13y ago
I worked for a short while in a national lab. They used to call this "air-gap" security. i.e., there would be computers which would have no internet connection and no usb/harddrive inputs etc. If they needed data in there, they would have one person read data from one computer and type it into the secure one. Essentially there would be a literal air-gap between the secure computer and the non-secure ones.
- iuguy 13y agoThe modern way of doing this is to have something called a 'sheep dip' station. This is an unconnected system that's used to check the contents of any import/export. The idea is that you cryptographically sign the material you want to import/export, burn it to write once media, pop it in the sheep dip box, confirm it's all hunky dory and if it is, import/export to/from the network. The media is then archived so it can be traced back. Typically the sheep dip station has AV and some other antimalware tools, but depending on what you're trying to do you might have a dedicated sheep dip person that manually checks the content of what you're importing/exporting (particularly for sensitive IP in large engineering and research organisations). When this happens, it usually takes weeks to get anything approved for import/export.
- makmanalp 13y agoThis is fascinating! Let me understand one thing: The sheep dip station is network connected to the sealed computer? Doesn't that still pose a risk and violate the principle? It seems you'd be better off checking at the dip station and then reimporting on the sealed computer. Then again, I suppose in that case you could have malware that detects what system it's on and decides not to activate on the dip station :)
- pasbesoin 13y agoI think you misunderstood iuguy's description. > unconnected system I understood this to be a literal description. I presume that this sheep dip station is maintained and updated, from time to time. However, that would be done using controlled, vetted media. And, if something goes wrong there, it has to been in the nature of something that will cause the masking of problems existing on the written/finalized media that the sheep dip station is in turn vetting. (Unless it's something that can "un-finalize" the vetting media and further write to it.) Or is the sheep dip station periodically connected while it is itself maintained/updated? That I could see presenting problems. In any event, I read this to mean in particular that the sheep dip station is not networked with the air gapped system.