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Comment by MayeulC | Hacker News Reader

Have you gone fully paranoid and your air-gaped system is in a Faraday cage inside an anechoic chamber? Things like bus radio [1], coil whine and power fluctuations can be used (it has been shown) to exfiltrate data.

[1] https://github.com/fulldecent/system-bus-radio

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Having worked in systems in the basements of TEMPEST checked buildings, I can say that the attacker first needs to eliminate the physical security measures, and manage to get close to the devices close to the servers storing, processing, transmitting the classified information. After that first breach via personally, or a specific device such as a USB dongle used by a user, the software needs to infect airgapped computers and find its way to the servers. Afterwards, the attacker needs to be close to the facility to listen to the radio, whose waves managed to get through the fortified walls with Faraday cages. And if this scenario happens, there is a huge problem with security, other than a system of a malware and an AM radio.

I was more thinking along the lines of an insider close to the device :)

We haven't gone as far as a Faraday Cage inside an anechoic chamber because we think the risks of these attacks is (luckily) not big enough (yet) for now to justify these. Eventually though? Maybe.

There's also projects to guess keystrokes based on sound which don't even require you to be on the host device https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29266783

In this case the private key is in HSM, and the laptop has no access to any interesting information worth to exfiltrate. Air gap is to prevent intrusion.

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