Is Your Computer Fan Whirring … It Could Be Sending Secret Messages to Your Phone?
The research team at the Ben-Gurion University in Israel have a long track record of sending messages over air gaps. This includes sending messages from vibrations in a USB stick. But now they have really stepped things up by proving that they can pick up message from the vibrations of a PC, and using the AiR-ViBeR method:
The team setup some malware on a computer, and which then sent messages to a mobile phone messages through vibrations passed through a table:
The method can cause vibrations in a computer, by varying the speed of a CPU fan, a GPU fan, a power supply fan, or chassis fan. Overall there is often good access to the power supply fan and the chassis fan, but where the power supply fan typically cannot be controlled for its speed.
Overall, the quality of the detection depends on the accuracy of the vibration sensor on the mobile phone. The researchers found that the access to the accelerometer did not require…
