Academics Steal Data From Air-Gapped Systems Via a Keyboard's LEDs

'The Caps Lock, Num Lock, and Scroll Lock LEDs on a keyboard can be
used to exfiltrate data from a secure air-gapped system, academics
from an Israeli university have proved. From a report:

The attack, which they named CTRL-ALT-LED, is nothing that regular
users should worry about but is a danger for highly secure
environments such as government networks that store top-secret
documents or enterprise networks dedicated to storing non-public
proprietary information. he attack requires some pre-requisites, such
as the malicious actor finding a way to infect an air-gapped system
with malware beforehand. CTRL-ALT-LED is only an exfiltration method.
But once these prerequisites are met, the malware running on a system
can make the LEDs of an USB-connected keyboard blink at rapid speeds,
using a custom transmission protocol and modulation scheme to encode
the transmitted data. A nearby attacker can record these tiny light
flickers, which they can decode at a later point, using the same
modulation scheme used to encode it.'

-- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/07/10/1836232

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
_______________________________________________
wlug mailing list | [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug