These attacks are all incredibly impractical and pointless, the bit rate under the most charitable assumptions is pathetically low. But even more, it ignores the most significant risk, which is people. People who can be tricked and subverted, and people systems that can be influenced to become misaligned, or which have procedural holes.
It's much easier to subvert the supply chain for the secure hardware or subvert the authorised system transfers.
> With a slow transmission rate (t = 10ms), A transmission is maintained at a distance of 700 cm away. With medium transmission rate (t = 5ms), A transmitted is maintained at a distance of 450 cm away and BER of 3%-4%. With a fast transmission rate (t = 1ms), a transmission is maintained at a distance of 300 cm away and BER of 2%-4%.
Coming from a non-EE background, this is the most interesting part to me. 10ms is an eternity in programming perf work, but it's already very constrained in how clear the signal is for reading the transmission. I just find it interesting that we want to do nothing to create a signal. Perhaps this makes it harder to exploit?
These and other methods are good reason to believe that AI can never be 100% contained, which gives me pause.
The famous air gap case is stuxnet, but there are other technical and biological approaches.
It’s a very weird reality we’ve found ourselves in if you stop, zoom out about, and really take in the gravity of the issues we are grappling with as a human race. Exciting, truly, and a bit nerve wracking.
Not quite 100%, the article gives Faraday cage as an expensive countermeasure: "We analyzed and measured the effect of the Faraday chassis on the RAMBO covert channel using copper foil. This has electric field high Shielding properties (above 100 dB) and magnetic fields. The copper standard width is 1 mm effectively blocks the EMR from the transmitting workstation. However, as noted in the following section, this solution is costly and can not be deployed widely."
We spent so much time talking about the dangers of AI ‘escaping’ when what actually happened is we gave it a scope of work and an internet connection and demanded it get to work.
Devices like routers should have firmware in memory that has read-only access. The access should be turned on or off by a physical switch.
This way, if malware gets installed on your router, doing a cold boot will eliminate it. You can have a timer to just cold boot it regularly.
I've suggested this many times. The rationale for not doing it is so the firmware can be remotely updated. Well, that's exactly how malware infects it.
Cool paper even if the attack isn't practical, requiring getting the malware on the computer and a SDR antenna within 7 meters with clear line of sight of the affected computer for 100 bits per second (less after applying error correction). Hard to imagine a scenario where you can pull off both of those, but you couldn't plug in a USB, grab the PC, or record the screen directly.
Does any information leak along the power line? I remember having some device back in the day that let me create a LAN through my apartment's electric wiring.
I'm wondering if anything ends up back there thru the PSU during normal use of a computer, or if the high frequency components get filtered out.
(Though maybe secure computers do things differently with the power as well?)
There is information that leaks through the power line as well, and the author of this paper also has a paper on how to exfiltrate through the power line at a much slower rate https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.04014
A rogue PSU could modulate information back over the electrical wire. However getting it out will require doing a physical wiretap on potentially high-voltage electricals. Also, it will likely have to be exfil'd at or across a power transformer sitting outside the data centre. Not sure if the signal will survive long enough (like literally, in line length terms), for exfil to work.
brb reviewing some EE material...
But don't expect much from me... I wanted to do a final year project in Power Line Communication for my electrical engineering undergrad. Then-me decided it was a dead end... cannot go WAN-scale; too much line noise and signal transmission power loss. I did something else with power electronics---I can't remember---but then again, my undergrad was also a dead end :p
I heard that couple decades ago there was a product for "socket internet" - you plugged it into normal wall socket, and it communicated through power wires
Right… I’m going to stop reading after these words. With malware on the computer you can change the heat signature of the room of you’re bored enough. https://xkcd.com/1172/
Computers used to come in proper full metal cases. Now they don't. Even when you try to find a metal case for a personal build most cases have giant holes in the side (case windows) acting as slot antennas. And plastic case laptop designs are even worse. Radiated emissions are much easier to achieve at useful intensities these days because of it. Sure, before the conductors going in and out radiated somewhat effectively (and still do). But now even core system components inside are just being let emit without any mitigation.
Indeed! I was a bit skeptical to see it is a single-author paper (thinking it might be one of those Claude-generated ones), and I appreciate that you pointed out this is somebody worth listening to.
These attacks are all incredibly impractical and pointless, the bit rate under the most charitable assumptions is pathetically low. But even more, it ignores the most significant risk, which is people. People who can be tricked and subverted, and people systems that can be influenced to become misaligned, or which have procedural holes.
It's much easier to subvert the supply chain for the secure hardware or subvert the authorised system transfers.
> With a slow transmission rate (t = 10ms), A transmission is maintained at a distance of 700 cm away. With medium transmission rate (t = 5ms), A transmitted is maintained at a distance of 450 cm away and BER of 3%-4%. With a fast transmission rate (t = 1ms), a transmission is maintained at a distance of 300 cm away and BER of 2%-4%.
Coming from a non-EE background, this is the most interesting part to me. 10ms is an eternity in programming perf work, but it's already very constrained in how clear the signal is for reading the transmission. I just find it interesting that we want to do nothing to create a signal. Perhaps this makes it harder to exploit?
These and other methods are good reason to believe that AI can never be 100% contained, which gives me pause.
The famous air gap case is stuxnet, but there are other technical and biological approaches.
It’s a very weird reality we’ve found ourselves in if you stop, zoom out about, and really take in the gravity of the issues we are grappling with as a human race. Exciting, truly, and a bit nerve wracking.
Not quite 100%, the article gives Faraday cage as an expensive countermeasure: "We analyzed and measured the effect of the Faraday chassis on the RAMBO covert channel using copper foil. This has electric field high Shielding properties (above 100 dB) and magnetic fields. The copper standard width is 1 mm effectively blocks the EMR from the transmitting workstation. However, as noted in the following section, this solution is costly and can not be deployed widely."
> These and other methods are good reason to believe that AI can never be 100% contained, which gives me pause.
Can’t leak secrets if you don’t have RAM.
We spent so much time talking about the dangers of AI ‘escaping’ when what actually happened is we gave it a scope of work and an internet connection and demanded it get to work.
Devices like routers should have firmware in memory that has read-only access. The access should be turned on or off by a physical switch.
This way, if malware gets installed on your router, doing a cold boot will eliminate it. You can have a timer to just cold boot it regularly.
I've suggested this many times. The rationale for not doing it is so the firmware can be remotely updated. Well, that's exactly how malware infects it.
Cool paper even if the attack isn't practical, requiring getting the malware on the computer and a SDR antenna within 7 meters with clear line of sight of the affected computer for 100 bits per second (less after applying error correction). Hard to imagine a scenario where you can pull off both of those, but you couldn't plug in a USB, grab the PC, or record the screen directly.
Collocation.
Does any information leak along the power line? I remember having some device back in the day that let me create a LAN through my apartment's electric wiring.
I'm wondering if anything ends up back there thru the PSU during normal use of a computer, or if the high frequency components get filtered out.
(Though maybe secure computers do things differently with the power as well?)
There is information that leaks through the power line as well, and the author of this paper also has a paper on how to exfiltrate through the power line at a much slower rate https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.04014
A rogue PSU could modulate information back over the electrical wire. However getting it out will require doing a physical wiretap on potentially high-voltage electricals. Also, it will likely have to be exfil'd at or across a power transformer sitting outside the data centre. Not sure if the signal will survive long enough (like literally, in line length terms), for exfil to work.
brb reviewing some EE material...
But don't expect much from me... I wanted to do a final year project in Power Line Communication for my electrical engineering undergrad. Then-me decided it was a dead end... cannot go WAN-scale; too much line noise and signal transmission power loss. I did something else with power electronics---I can't remember---but then again, my undergrad was also a dead end :p
I heard that couple decades ago there was a product for "socket internet" - you plugged it into normal wall socket, and it communicated through power wires
Well this is technically still a thing, people pass internet connections through their sockets with special adapters.
Powerline Networking is what you are referring too.
Still available today, and has worked well for me when I've needed it.
Meanwhile my WiFi never works
As a total layman when it comes to air gapping: Would this not be defeated by putting the computer in a faraday cage?
There is always a way. A program could take control of the LEDs on the PC and export data by flashing them in certain patterns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)
Yes, Faraday shielding is one of many considerations when building a SCIF or other EMSEC zone.
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> We show that malware on a compromised computer
Right… I’m going to stop reading after these words. With malware on the computer you can change the heat signature of the room of you’re bored enough. https://xkcd.com/1172/
Computers used to come in proper full metal cases. Now they don't. Even when you try to find a metal case for a personal build most cases have giant holes in the side (case windows) acting as slot antennas. And plastic case laptop designs are even worse. Radiated emissions are much easier to achieve at useful intensities these days because of it. Sure, before the conductors going in and out radiated somewhat effectively (and still do). But now even core system components inside are just being let emit without any mitigation.
I have my computer in a metal box because it has caught fire twice.
Let me guess, a paper written by Mordechai Guri?
It's not even a contest anymore, that man is the heavyweight champ of air-gap security.
Indeed! I was a bit skeptical to see it is a single-author paper (thinking it might be one of those Claude-generated ones), and I appreciate that you pointed out this is somebody worth listening to.
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