SATAn: Air-Gap Exfiltration Attack via Radio Signals From SATA Cables

Topic

New Reply

https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.07413

This paper introduces a new type of attack on isolated, air-gapped workstations. Although air-gap computers have no wireless connectivity, we show that attackers can use the SATA cable as a wireless antenna to transfer radio signals at the 6 GHz frequency band.

The Serial ATA (SATA) is a bus interface widely used in modern computers and connects the host bus to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. The prevalence of the SATA interface makes this attack highly available to attackers in a wide range of computer systems and IT environments.

We discuss related work on this topic and provide technical background.
We show the design of the transmitter and receiver and present the implementation of these components.
We also demonstrate the attack on different computers and provide the evaluation…

Reply | Quote

Replies

An attacker needs to be nearby and you need to have data worth stealing.
And computers with only an NVMe disk are unlikely to be accessible because they don’t have a cable.

cheers, Paul

Reply | Quote

Here’s a good whimsical air-gap example from pop culture. Do you remember the scene from the movie Mission Impossible where Tom Cruise rappels down from the ceiling?

Cruise lowers himself from an air vent and dangles just feet above the floor as he steals a list from an air-gapped computer in FBI headquarters.

https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/air-gapped-computer/

Desktop Asus TUF X299 Mark 1, CPU: Intel Core i7-7820X Skylake-X 8-Core 3.6 GHz, RAM: 32GB, GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. Display: Four 27" 1080p screens 2 over 2 quad.

Reply | Quote

It may be a good idea to start making shielded SATA cables.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

Reply | Quote