SATAn hack can steal data directly from your SATA cable
SATAn hack can steal data directly from your SATA cable https://share.newsbreak.com/1gozsduo Researchers at the University of the Negev, Israel, have published a paper that demonstrates how a hacker could extract data from an otherwise secure system via its SATA cable. The attack uses the SATA cable itself as a form of wireless transmitter, and the data it carries can be intercepted as a form of radio signal in the 6GHz band. The attack is appropriately referred to as SATAn. The researchers published a paper here (opens in new tab) (via Tom’s Hardware (opens in new tab)). They successfully demonstrated the technique and showed it in a video that’s included above. It has to be said that this kind of attack is complicated and requires specific malware to be installed on the target machine. It requires specialized shellcode to modify file system activity that generates identifiable radio signals from SATA cables.The electromagnetic leakage of the cables can be intercepted by a wireless receiver and replicated on a second device. The researchers entered the word ‘secret’ on the target machine, which was picked up by a second machine. It’s just a simple demo but there’s no reason that targeted malware couldn’t be used to extract passwords or other sensitive text information. It’s a complicated method as it would require access to the target computer. An air gapped system without any network access would require malware to be directly installed. There’s also the problem that the SATA signal emission is weak and requires the receiving antenna to be around 1 meter away. It’s not easy to just walk up to a secure system and say hi.
enticing rocking posts from jim bell via tracking links i looked for the quantum programming book in library genesis but it's not there yet. there are older books, though, you could just look up how to gain access to quantum computers to try things out the SATAn paper is https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.07413 . the attack is not very new as far as i know. 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. The results show that attackers can use the SATA cable to transfer a brief amount of sensitive information from highly secured, air-gap computers wirelessly to a nearby receiver. Furthermore, we show that the attack can operate from user mode, is effective even from inside a Virtual Machine (VM), and can successfully work with other running workloads in the background. Finally, we discuss defense and mitigation techniques for this new air-gap attack.
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