Security News > 2021 > October > LANtenna hack spies on your data from across the room! (Sort of)

LANtenna hack spies on your data from across the room! (Sort of)
2021-10-15 18:58

Mordechai Guri from the abovementioned Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel has recently published a new 'data exfiltration' paper detailing an unexpectedly effective way of sneaking very small amounts of data out of a cabled network without using any obvious sort of interconnection.

How to split a network into two parts, running at different security levels, that can nevertheless co-operate and even exchange data when needed, but only in strictly controlled and well-monitored ways.

Physically disconnecting the two networks so that human intervention is needed to move data between them seems like an obvious solution, creating the proverbial "Airgap" mentioned in the title of Guri's paper.

What about data exfiltration across an airgap in a post-Stuxnet world, where the operators of airgapped networks have become much stricter about the "Border controls" between the two sides of the network?

Send innocent data while toggling the network speed of the sending LAN card.

Speed toggling is also likely to get spotted and routinely logged by network monitoring hardware, not least because network cards that keep switching speed suggest hardware problems as well as being suspicious from a security perspective.


News URL

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2021/10/15/lantenna-hack-spies-on-your-data-from-across-the-room-sort-of/