BitJabber: The World’s Fastest Electromagnetic Covert Channel
Zihao Zhan, Zhenkai Zhang, Xenofon Koutsoukos
Abstract
An air-gapped computer is physically isolated from unsecured networks to guarantee effective protection against data exfiltration. Due to air gaps, unauthorized data transfer seems impossible over legitimate communication channels, but in reality many so-called physical covert channels can be constructed to allow data exfiltration across the air gaps. Most of such covert channels are very slow and often require certain strict conditions to work (e.g., no physical obstacles between the sender and the receiver). In this paper, we introduce a new physical covert channel named BitJabber that is extremely fast and strong enough to even penetrate concrete walls. We show that this covert channel can be easily created by an unprivileged sender running on a victim's computer. Specifically, the sender constructs the channel by using only memory accesses to modulate the electromagnetic (EM) signals generated by the DRAM clock. While possessing a very high bandwidth (up to 300,000 bps), this new covert channel is also very reliable (less than 1% error rate). More importantly, this covert channel can enable data exfiltration from an air-gapped computer enclosed in a room with thick concrete walls up to 15 cm.