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SCREEN2AIR: Exploiting Screen Savers for Covert Long-Distance Data Exfiltration and Defense

Authors:
Ye-Rim Jeong
Yeon-Jin Kim
Chea-Yeon Park
Il-Gu Lee

Keywords: Air-Gap; Data Leak; Screen Saver; Cybersecurity.

Abstract:
An air-gapped network is used as a representative protection mechanism to strengthen cybersecurity by physically separating systems. However, to enhance the security of such environments practically, in-depth research on air-gap attack techniques should first be conducted. This study proposes SCREEN2AIR, a novel air-gap attack technique that utilizes screen savers and a high-dimensional modulation technique to encode large amounts of information. Screen savers generally do not cause user suspicion because they are automatically executed when the user is absent and exhibit excellent detection evasion. The experimental results demonstrated that a stable extraction success rate, up to 13 times higher than that off the conventional QR code-based method, can be maintained when the number of cells is small. In addition, we propose a technique to intentionally lower screen saver image quality to defend against decoding, and we experimentally demonstrate that the attack success rate can be reduced by up to 95% compared to using normal high-quality images.

Pages: 20 to 25

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2025

Publication date: October 26, 2025

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4405

ISBN: 978-1-68558-304-0

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from October 26, 2025 to October 30, 2025