SATAn Turns Hard Drive Cable Into Antenna To Defeat Air-Gapped Security

It would seem like [Mordechai Guri]’s lab at Ben-Gurion College is the place where by air-gapped computer systems go to die, or at the very least to give up their insider secrets. And this hack working with a computer’s SATA cable as an antenna to exfiltrate information is another illustration of just how many facet-channel assaults the normal Computer system can make accessible.

The exploit, deliciously selected “SATAn,” relies on the fact that the SATA 3. interface utilized in many personal computers has a bandwidth of 6. Gb/s, which means that manipulating the computer’s IO would make it achievable to transmit details from an air-gapped device at all over 6 GHz. It’s a sophisticated exploit, of training course, and consists of positioning a transmitting program on the concentrate on equipment employing the normal solutions, such as phishing or zero-day exploits. As soon as in area, the transmitting system uses a combination of read and write operations on the SATA disk to make RF indicators that encode the facts to be exfiltrated, with the details lines within the SATA cable performing as antennae.

SATAn is proven in motion in the video clip beneath. It requires a even though to transmit just a number of bytes of data, and the array is less than a meter, but that could be sufficient for the exploit to realize success. The exam set up utilizes an SDR — specifically, an ADALM PLUTO — and a notebook, but you can quickly picture a much scaled-down deal getting built for a stealthy walk-by type assault. [Mordechai] also gives a opportunity countermeasure for SATAn, which essentially thrashes the hard push to generate RF noise to mask any produced indicators.

When probably confined in its sensible purposes, SATAn is an exciting side-channel assault to increase to [Dr. Guri]’s checklist of exploits. From optical exfiltration employing stability cameras to turning ability supplies into speakers, the vulnerabilities just retain piling up.

https://www.youtube.com/view?v=rlmP-csuFIo

Thanks to [chuckt] for the tip.

[via Bleeping Computer]