It's been a while since my Alice-loving physics and white bunnies🐰🧬

Today I'm going to talk about Air-Gap hacking via radio waves .📡
How an intruder can use SATA cables as an antenna for transmitting signals.🔌

For starters, for those who do not remember or do not know what Air-Gap is

An Air-Gap is a device that works without an internet connection - for added security, used to store particularly important data. 

They are often used at military sites, and sites with high value data.
To break into these things an intruder has to resort to physics. Like electromagnetic, radio, thermal vulnerabilities and attacks.

We will talk about one of these attacks today.

Attackers can use a SATA cable as a wireless antenna to transmit radio signals on the 6 GHz frequency band. 

SATA is a bus wire commonly used in modern computers and connects the host bus to storage devices such as hard drives, optical disks and solid state drives. The prevalence of the SATA interface makes this attack very accessible to attackers
Firstly, let's talk about the attack itself.

I will first explain the model itself, then go into more detail

Attackers can use a strategy known as APT to steal data.
The life cycle of a threat consists of various stages. The main stages are penetration, bridgehead creation, lateral movement, data collection, and exfiltration .

To begin with infiltration.
During this phase a hacker installs malware on the target network, the attacker can use sophisticated techniques such as supply chain attacks, removable media attacks, malicious insiders and phishing (for example, to get a job at their site or to trick employees). Most of these attacks use removable media such as USB to infect our isolated facility.

Now for the data collection.
Once the attack has established itself on the target network, it moves on to the data collection phase. In this phase, various data is collected. The information can be passed from victim to victim and includes: files containing confidential information, keystrokes, emails, images, keystrokes, etc.

Let us talk about data exfiltration
At a given moment, an attacker may want to exfiltrate the data.

At this point, the malware will find workstations or servers on the network which have active SATA interfaces. 

The malware then uses a specialized shellcode to maintain file system activity to generate radio signals from the SATA cables. The collected data is modulated, encoded and transmitted via this covert channel.

Now the fun part is data reception
Information can be received in many different ways.
For example, the hardware receiver can be hidden on the implanted next to our computer . Also an intruder sneaks a radio receiver next to the computer , e.g. inside an PC. The receiver monitors the 6 GHz spectrum for potential transmissions, demodulates the data, and sends it to the intruder.🔑

Well, I think that's clear, let's discuss it more technically🧬
#SATA #attacks #polymorphic #wireless_hacking #air_gap #covert_channels