Jumping Air Gaps

Nice profile of Mordechai Guri, who researches a variety of clever ways to steal data over air-gapped computers.

Guri and his fellow Ben-Gurion researchers have shown, for instance, that it's possible to trick a fully offline computer into leaking data to another nearby device via the noise its internal fan generates, by changing air temperatures in patterns that the receiving computer can detect with thermal sensors, or even by blinking out a stream of information from a computer hard drive LED to the camera on a quadcopter drone hovering outside a nearby window. In new research published today, the Ben-Gurion team has even shown that they can pull data off a computer protected by not only an air gap, but also a Faraday cage designed to block all radio signals.

Here's a page with all the research results.

BoingBoing post.

from Jumping Air Gaps