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Comment by cornholio

9 days ago

Because it lowers the threshold for a total informational compromise attack from "exfiltrate 34PB of data from secure govt infrastructure" down to "exfiltrate 100KB of key material". You can get that out over a few days just by pulsing any LED visible from outside an air-gapped facility.

4 comments

cornholio

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dkga  9 days ago

Wait what?

  • lambdaone  8 days ago

    There are all sorts of crazy ways of getting data out of even air-gapped machines, providing you are willing to accept extremely low data rates to overcome attenuation. Even with million-to-one signal-to-noise ratio, you can get significant amounts of key data out in a few weeks.

    Jiggling disk heads, modulating fan rates, increasing and decreasing power draw... all are potential information leaks.