New Air-Gap Attack Uses MEMS Gyroscope Ultrasonic Covert Channel to Leak Data

guest · Aug 23, 2022

August 22, 2022

A novel data exfiltration technique has been found to leverage a covert ultrasonic channel to leak sensitive information from isolated, air-gapped computers to a nearby smartphone that doesn't even require a microphone to pick up the sound waves.

Dubbed GAIROSCOPE, the adversarial model is the latest addition to a long list of acoustic, electromagnetic, optical, and thermal approaches devised by Dr. Mordechai Guri, the head of R&D in the Cyber Security Research Center in the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

"Our malware generates ultrasonic tones in the resonance frequencies of the MEMS gyroscope," Dr. Guri said in a new paper published this week. "These inaudible frequencies produce tiny mechanical oscillations within the smartphone's gyroscope, which can be demodulated into binary information."
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What's new this time around is that it also requires infecting the smartphones of employees working in the victim organization with a rogue app that, for its part, is deployed by means of attack vectors like social engineering, malicious ads, or compromised websites, among others.
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arXiv: GAIROSCOPE: Injecting Data from Air-Gapped Computers to Nearby Gyroscopes

It is known that malware can leak data from isolated, air-gapped computers to nearby smartphones using ultrasonic waves. However, this covert channel requires access to the smartphone's microphone, which is highly protected in Android OS and iOS, and might be non-accessible, disabled, or blocked.
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In this paper we present `GAIROSCOPE,' an ultrasonic covert channel that doesn't require a microphone on the receiving side. Our malware generates ultrasonic tones in the resonance frequencies of the MEMS gyroscope. These inaudible frequencies produce tiny mechanical oscillations within the smartphone's gyroscope, which can be demodulated into binary information.

Notably, the gyroscope in smartphones is considered to be a 'safe' sensor that can be used legitimately from mobile apps and javascript. We introduce the adversarial attack model and present related work. We provide the relevant technical background and show the design and implementation of GAIROSCOPE. We present the evaluation results and discuss a set of countermeasures to this threat. Our experiments show that attackers can exfiltrate sensitive information from air-gapped computers to smartphones located a few meters away via Speakers-to-Gyroscope covert channel.
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longshots · Aug 23, 2022

What's new this time around is that it also requires infecting the smartphones of employees working in the victim organization with a rogue app that, for its part, is deployed by means of attack vectors like social engineering, malicious ads, or compromised websites, among others.
Click to expand...

And, once again, that infamous disclaimer rears its ugly head!

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New Air-Gap Attack Uses MEMS Gyroscope Ultrasonic Covert Channel to Leak Data

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New Air-Gap Attack Uses MEMS Gyroscope Ultrasonic Covert Channel to Leak Data

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