A Review of Various Attack Methods on Air-Gapped Systems

In the past air-gapped systems that are isolated from networks have been considered to be very secure. Yet there have been reports of such systems being breached. These breaches have shown to use unconventional means for communication also known as covert channels such as Acoustic, Electromagnetic, Magnetic, Electric, Optical, and Thermal to transfer data. In this paper, a review of various attack methods that can compromise an air-gapped system is presented along with a summary of how efficient and dangerous a particular method could be. The capabilities of each covert channel are listed to better understand the threat it poses and also some countermeasures to safeguard against such attack methods are mentioned. These attack methods have already been proven to work and awareness of such covert channels for data exfiltration is crucial in various industries.