High Data Throughput Exfiltration Through Video Cable Emanations

The present work investigates the feasibility to exfiltrate a large amount of data from a computer by leveraging the unintended electromagnetic emanations of an HDMI cable to reconstruct its content. The low signal strength and noise of the leaked signals make difficult to recover any useful information, particularly when the content information is text based, since it suffers from low readability. We consider a targeted attack in which malicious software executed inside the victim’s machine encodes the desired information into QR codes, which are then modulated on the HDMI cable and in turn received and reconstructed by the attacker. The efficiency of this method is evaluated under practical conditions showing that the system is capable of achieving a data exfiltration rate up to 12.67 Kbps under optimal conditions or 2.08 Kbps at 50 m distance. To the best of our knowledge, these results outperform, in terms of distance range and exfiltration rate, previous work in the field of electromagnetic leakage from the literature.