Research: Stealing data from air-gapped PC by turning RAM into Wi-Fi Card

guest · Dec 19, 2020

Research: Stealing data from air-gapped PC by turning RAM into Wi-Fi Card
December 18, 2020
https://www.hackread.com/stealing-data-from-air-gapped-pc-ram-wi-fi-card/

According to the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel researchers, the new AIR-FI technique can convert a RAM card into a wireless emitter to transmit sensitive data from within a non-networked air-gapped computer that doesn’t have a built-in Wi-Fi card.

Mordechai Guri, the university’s Cyber Security Research Labs’ R&D head, discovered the new technique. Guri is the pioneer in researches on novel ways air-gapped systems can be exploited for stealing data.
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In AIR-FI, an air-gapped system lets a third-party to steal data from any system that’s not connected to a network. This is achieved by generating a Wi-Fi signal using DDR and SDRAM memory buses within the 2.4GHz range. The attack doesn’t involve the use of any particular hardware.

“We show that nearby Wi-Fi-capable devices (e.g., smartphones, laptops, IoT devices) can intercept these signals, decode them, and send them to the attacker over the Internet,” said Guri.
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The team noted that it is possible to exfiltrate data from air-gapped computers to nearby Wi-Fi receivers from a distance of 7 meters.
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arXiv: AIR-FI: Generating Covert Wi-Fi Signals from Air-Gapped Computers

In this paper, we show that attackers can exfiltrate data from air-gapped computers via Wi-Fi signals.

To extract the signals, we utilize the physical layer information exposed by the Wi-Fi chips. We implement the transmitter and receiver and discuss design considerations and implementation details.
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Research: Stealing data from air-gapped PC by turning RAM into Wi-Fi Card

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