Girl With No Name
Start here • Updates Wednesdays
“I had a dream. I was in a strange land. A vast wilderness. I went on and on, but met no one. I called, I shouted... but no one answered. I was alone.”
-Akira Kurosawa, Ran
Look, I get this question a lot for obvious reasons, so I know you won’t like the answer. It’s dissatisfying. But, because you asked, the best cybersecurity commercially available is something called an air-gapped computer.
An air-gapped computer has no network card. You won’t see a cerulean ethernet cord spouting from the stern of the case. There’s no hard, hollow plastic antenna to receive a wifi signal. It doesn’t have Bluetooth. My compsci professor at Tech explained it like this: there’s a literal wall of air—a gap—between the computer and anything that could inject it with compromising code. This abstinence-only approach makes air-gapped computers cheap, simple, and impenetrably secure.
But much like celibacy, not a lot of people opt for the air-gapped method. What’s the point of a computer, they ask, without e-mail and Twitter and porn? And I understand that. There were days I got so dog-tired of the manual data dumps, of examining each file down to the binary before connecting the USB, of hand-transcribing scraps of code onto sheets of paper; of the day-to-day ennui of existence inside those invisible walls. But when I break into a system, all I see is each and every way very, very bad things can get in.
The air wall was better. It let me breathe.
My laptop had to be online so I could access those vulnerable systems, but my desktop was air-gapped—a little black lockbox of my pdfs, jpgs, pngs, mp3s, mp4s, xls, txts, zips, bins, bats, dats, all my associate backgrounds and every line of my code. Every byte of my identifying information was kept there; separate, and secret, and self-contained.