https://intellisec.de/research/lasershark/

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LaserShark: Establishing Fast, Bidirectional Communication into
Air-Gapped Systems

Abstract

Physical isolation, so called air-gapping, is an effective method for
protecting security-critical computers and networks. While it might
be possible to introduce malicious code through the supply chain,
insider attacks, or social engineering, communicating with the
outside world is prevented. Different approaches to breach this
essential line of defense have been developed based on electro-
magnetic, acoustic, and optical communication channels. However, all
of these approaches are limited in either data rate or distance, and
frequently offer only exfiltration of data. We present a novel
approach to infiltrate data to air-gapped systems without any
additional hardware on-site. By aiming lasers at already built-in
LEDs and recording their response, we are the first to enable a
long-distance (25 m), bidirectional, and fast (18.2 kbps in & 100
kbps out) covert communication channel. The approach can be used
against any office device that operates LEDs at the CPU's GPIO
interface.

[setup]

Team

  * Niclas Kuhnapfel
  * Stefan Preussler
  * Maximilian Noppel
  * Thomas Schneider
  * Konrad Rieck
  * Christian Wressnegger (Contact)

Proof-of-Concept Implementations

To foster future research and push forward defenses against covert
channels, we make all code used during the experiments, raw data of
the hardware measurements, and scripts to plot them available in the
repository at:

https://github.com/intellisec/lasershark

Publication

A detailed description of our work will been presented at the 37th
Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC 2021) in
December 2021. If you would like to cite our work, please use the
reference as provided below:

@InProceedings{KuePreNopSchRieWre21,
author =    {Niclas Kuhnapfel and Stefan Preussler and
Maximilian Noppel and Thomas Schneider and
Konrad Rieck and Christian Wressnegger},
title =     {LaserShark: Establishing Fast, Bidirectional
Communication into Air-Gapped Systems},
booktitle = {Proc. of 37th Annual Computer Security
Applications Conference (ACSAC)},
year =      2021,
month =     dec
}

A preprint of the paper is available here.

Video

The following video shows a simplified setup of the attack as
descriped here that can be easily re-built at home with low-cost
devices rather than strong lasers and a high-precision telescope as
used for the real attack.

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