Analysis of IEMI effects on a computer network in a realistic environment

Effects on computer networks due to intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI) are a well known phenomena. However, when a perturbation occurs in a real world environment the effects may not always be obvious. In case computers crash or reboot repeatedly it is clear that there is a source of malfunction. The same applies to flickering monitors or unpredictable behaviour of input devices. But more often there are no evident and direct observable effects which can be seen in the network communication between two computers. In this paper a quantitative method for analysing the effects from a commercially available damped sinusoidal source with high output power on a computer network in a typical infrastructure environment is presented. The measurements show the impact on the communication which can directly be observed on the link layer. The results provide approaches for detecting IEMI attacks and give a realistic estimation of the threat potential of today's high-power electromagnetic (HPEM) sources.