Only half related, but it's kind of neat that we've used such a relatively simple standard of radio for so long. Modern modulation schemes are so complicated that they require dedicated functionality just to interpret. Wasn't always like that.
System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware
101–110 of 125 posts
Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware
#102People had fanciful minds. They had expected the civilization to end in bio-warfare, or atomic bombs, or a blazing meteorite impact. No such luck. The end of the civilization came, rather anticlimactically, when the humans discovered that side effects and timing attacks made any form of cyber-security a joke. Their computers screeched to a halt bogged down by nightmarish security patches. By then, it was already too…
This code is more fun and interesting than scary. The only way this could be used maliciously would be in the one-in-a-million environment where arbitrary code execution is possible but exfiltration is difficult and where the attacker has physical proximity to the machine. The other 999,999 times, if you have ACE then it's much simpler to just exfiltrate via the network or USB or etc.
Scenario: broadcasting out passwords and PINs
Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware
#103Back a couple of decades, my alphabetic pager was going off but the messages were gibberish. It turned out the CPU in the PC I'd been asked to look at was a Pentium running at 150 MHz. I'd set my pager directly on top of the case, and the nominal frequency for it was 150.5 MHz, frequency modulated. The lines in the motherboard can be used as antennae and the CPU pins can produce a clock pulse and modulate it. There u…
Years ago I was in the same building during the installation of a "NATO standard" (whatever that means) environment suitable for developing sensitive software, and the air gap was indeed pretty large, the entire 2 rooms were air gapped from the building (at 4th floor), enclosed in a Faraday cage and with special precautions (out of my clearance level) for electricity going in. It was very quiet inside (even cell phon…
I'm very curious (from an academic thought-experiment standpoint) what sorts of mitigations could be used for electrical lines in an environment like this.
My first thought - an alternate reality where you could turn power to (say) 100kW of light and then back again - would actually not be enough, as light can be pulsed so rapidly we're already using it to encode data. Welp.
I'm guessing that UPS-type equipment was used as a form of powerline isolation, at least.
Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
This code is more fun and interesting than scary. The only way this could be used maliciously would be in the one-in-a-million environment where arbitrary code execution is possible but exfiltration is difficult and where the attacker has physical proximity to the machine. The other 999,999 times, if you have ACE then it's much simpler to just exfiltrate via the network or USB or etc.
Scenario: broadcasting out passwords and PINs
Solution: bluetooth transciever silicon is <5mm square when packaged
Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware
#105If I were to run this on a VM, would the host machine start transmitting AM, or would the hypervisor ruin the mechanism in which this works? I rent a VPS at a nearby datacenter, and I could maybe ask for a tour. It would be interesting if I could pick up these signals from their server racks by running the code on my VM.
I thought about this for a minute, and my theory is that it wouldn't, because the hypervisor wasn't based on an RTOS. If it was RTOS-based, and the hypervisor's needed to use a known constant amount of time for its own housekeeping, you might be able to find a frequently multiple that worked.
But as things are, I don't THINK so, due to indeterminate scheduling. The likelihood is very low. (Translation: I really do want this to work because it would be cool :P - but the VM world has already been turned upside down this year....)
If you have a spare machine lying around you could maybe spin up the same VM software on that and see if anything interesting happens. After establishing very very good radio transmissions off the bare metal (and finding all potential frequencies etc), of course.
The other good question is what sort of transmission frequency would be used by the hardware your VPS is running on. That would be fun to find out about...
Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware
#106If you're ever near Stuttgart, Germany, go and visit the university's computer museum! http://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/ Klemens usually feeds punched cards into one of his treasures and puts a radio on top. Playing music. So much to see! http://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/cm003.html Including real core memory.
Living Computer Museums are fascinating. Anyone who's in Seattle for any length of time owes it to themselves to check out the Living Computer Museum: http://www.livingcomputers.org/Discover/At-The-Museum/Vintag... In addition to the working Alto, MITS Altair, etc. they have a dedicated cold room for working vintage mainframes. You can even request an account on one of 'em so you can remotely telnet in. You're also o…
Also quite good is the Centre For Computing History in Cambridge.
Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware
#107This sounds like a modern-day equivalent of the classic "Fool on the Hill" played on the AM radio sitting on top of an Altair 8800 ( recreated in the video below ):
Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware
#108Can you someone do a ELI5 on this project? Tried to read but couldn't move further.
Here's one. This sentence from the linked paper is informative - "When data is exchanged between the CPU and the RAM, radio waves are emitted from the bus's long parallel circuits." For some background: Digital circuits like computer motherboards have components called oscillators that switch voltage on and off a number of times every second. This is what "clock speeds" refers to - 2.8 GHz CPU clock speed means volta…
First realize the aptitude modulation in this radio is very crude. Unlike normal radio which has many amplitudes, this radio only has 2. On and off. Tone or no tone. This radio has no control over the exact amplitude.
Due to this limitation, this radio can only transfer a single tone at a time. Music must be monophonic.
To transfer a 60htz tone we just switch between the on and off state at 60htz. The On state will be at some random amplitude that we can't control.
What are these states? In the On state, we write to a memory address repeatedly very very fast (as fast as the computer allows). And in the off state we sleep.
Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Years ago I was in the same building during the installation of a "NATO standard" (whatever that means) environment suitable for developing sensitive software, and the air gap was indeed pretty large, the entire 2 rooms were air gapped from the building (at 4th floor), enclosed in a Faraday cage and with special precautions (out of my clearance level) for electricity going in. It was very quiet inside (even cell phon…
I'm very curious (from an academic thought-experiment standpoint) what sorts of mitigations could be used for electrical lines in an environment like this. My first thought - an alternate reality where you could turn power to (say) 100kW of light and then back again - would actually not be enough, as light can be pulsed so rapidly we're already using it to encode data. Welp. I'm guessing that UPS-type equipment was u…
My understanding is that what capacitors would mitigate. Computers run on DC.
Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware
#110People had fanciful minds. They had expected the civilization to end in bio-warfare, or atomic bombs, or a blazing meteorite impact. No such luck. The end of the civilization came, rather anticlimactically, when the humans discovered that side effects and timing attacks made any form of cyber-security a joke. Their computers screeched to a halt bogged down by nightmarish security patches. By then, it was already too…
I wouldn’t sell NBC weapons short... at least not the B and N parts. Nukes are dangerous in the hands of nations, but my god you just wait until every asshole with a laptop and $10,000 worth of equipment can customize their own plague. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re close, and regulating that is going to be utterly impossible.
It’s possible to exist in a relative detente between nations, but when the capacity to end human civilization is democratized we are dead. Many forms of incredible tech are really maturing, and frankly our laws are a century or more behind. We’re in real trouble if we have to wait to be burned to believe in the fire this time.
Unfortunately it seems that most of the smartest people are desperately trying to strike it rich, and that’s just about all. Even most of the people who want to make a difference only feel they can/should after making “fuck you money.”