air-gapped

English

Etymology

From air gap +‎ -ed.

Adjective

air-gapped (not comparable)

1. (computer security, of a system) Physically isolated from the Internet or some other unsecured network.
   • 2013 August 13, Peter Maass, “How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets”, in The New York Times‎^[1], →ISSN:

     In addition to encrypting any sensitive e-mails, she began using different computers for editing film, for communicating and for reading sensitive documents (the one for sensitive documents is air-gapped, meaning it has never been connected to the Internet).

   • 2016 June 28, Kim Zetter, “Clever Attack Uses the Sound of a Computer’s Fan to Steal Data”, in Wired‎^[2], →ISSN:

     In the past two years a group of researchers in Israel has become highly adept at stealing data from air-gapped computers—those machines prized by hackers that, for security reasons, are never connected to the internet or connected to other machines that are connected to the internet, making it difficult to extract data from them.

   • 2016, William D. Bryant, International Conflict and Cyberspace Superiority: Theory and Practice, Routledge, →ISBN, page 153:

     It also appears that the controllers running the centrifuges were air gapped and not directly connected to the Internet.

Related terms

• air gap

References

• Kim Zetter, "Hacker Lexicon: What Is an Air Gap?", Wired, 8 December 2014.