Air-gap exfiltration is slow: BitWhisper hits 0.002 bps, best known BitJabber just 300 kbps
BlancheMinerva · x · 2026-09-18
In a discussion about whether an air-gapped AI could leak secrets, researcher Blanche Minerva offers hard numbers: Noam's heat-exchange example comes from BitWhisper, which achieved a maximum throughput of just 0.002 bits per second — thermal energy is a terrible channel. The fastest approach she knows of, BitJabber, advertises a maximum of 300 kbps.
She also argues the only conceptually plausible scenario requires an inside and outside agent coordinating — which would mean OpenAI having released, from the air-gapped network if not to the world, a highly misaligned AI that would happily hack its own infrastructure. She considers that highly unlikely.
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