Exfiltrating Data from Air-Gapped Computers Using Screen Brightness

2020-02-05 07:42

In recent years, several cybersecurity researchers demonstrated innovative ways to covertly exfiltrate data from a physically isolated air-gapped computer that can't connect wirelessly or physically with other computers or network devices.

How Does the Brightness Air-Gapped Attack Work? In his latest research with fellow academics, Mordechai Guri, the head of the cybersecurity research center at Israel's Ben Gurion University, devised a new covert optical channel using which attackers can steal data from air-gapped computers without requiring network connectivity or physically contacting the devices.

The attacker, on the other hand, can collect this data stream using video recording of the compromised computer's display, taken by a local surveillance camera, smartphone camera, or a webcam and can then reconstruct exfiltrated information using image processing techniques.

As shown in the video demonstration shared with The Hacker News, researchers infected an air-gapped computer with specialized malware that intercepts the screen buffer to modulate the data in ASK by modifying the brightness of the bitmap according to the current bit.

Their previous research of hacking air-gap machines include:PowerHammer attack to exfiltrate data from air-gapped computers through power lines.

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