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Comment by pulse7 | Hacker News Reader

I hope air gaping will stay a niche. If it goes mainstream there will be more attacks on it...

There's some interesting attacks based on working out the sound of each key on a keyboard and then guessing keystrokes - https://github.com/ggerganov/kbd-audio

Airgapped machines ought to be housed in an airgapped room, equivalent to a SCIF.

Funny you mention this because the SCIF tech specs from DNI.gov are cited a lot in our physical security envelope docs, interesting but very terse read, I wouldn't read the whole thing for fun: https://www.dni.gov/files/Governance/IC-Tech-Specs-for-Const...

I'd skip to Chapter 2: Risk Management and Chapter 3: Fixed Facility SCIF Construction

You could let the system ask the characters of the passwords in random order. It would be a bit of a hassle, but gives some added protection for largish passwords.

Can a white noise machine help there? https://ggerganov.github.io/jekyll/update/2018/11/30/keytap-... says the method is sensitive to noise.

Blasting some Meshuggah should do it

Meshuggah is a fixed pattern that can be subtracted. Ideally noise should unpredictable.

True, I guess they'd need to perform it live - as part of the security ceremony

Preferably in ceremonial cloaks

“..it cannot connect to any wireless network, so we don’t have to worry about it doing so maliciously. We’ve also taken other measures to frustrate attackers, for example we have physically removed the hard drive so there is no way to persist data on the laptop itself”

Hopefully by physically removing where possible? Also consider microphone and speakers if you’ve not already..

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