whurley cites BitWhisper paper to debunk Noam Brown's air-gap attack fearmongering
whurley · x · 2026-09-18
Quantum computing expert whurley publicly pushed back on Noam Brown's doomer claims about air-gapped computers being attackable via thermal covert channels. He traces the claim to BitWhisper (IEEE CSF 2015) and its extensions like HVACKer: experiments require two already-compromised machines 0-40cm apart, with effective rates of just 1-8 bits per hour — enough only for brief commands or small data like passwords. He argues framing this as a practical threat is "mostly academic" fearmongering and linked the arXiv paper for readers to judge.
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