Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. We are kicking off the new year with a deep dive into something that has been popping up all over my GitHub feed lately. I am Corn, and I am joined by my brother and resident expert on all things technical and obscure.
Herman Poppleberry at your service. Happy twenty twenty-six, Corn. It is a great time to be talking about this because the landscape of privacy and security has shifted so much in just the last twelve months.
It really has. Our housemate Daniel actually sent us a prompt about this. He noticed that a lot of AI and software projects on GitHub are explicitly mentioning air-gap compatibility now. It is not just for nuclear silos anymore. Daniel was asking who is actually using these systems in the real world, how on earth you keep them updated without an internet connection, and how you prevent something like a modern-day Stuxnet from hitching a ride on a thumb drive.
That is a fantastic set of questions. Daniel is right on the money with the observation that air-gapping is having a bit of a mainstream moment. For a long time, it was the extreme end of the security spectrum, reserved for the three-letter agencies or critical infrastructure. But as we move into twenty twenty-six, the value of data, especially proprietary AI models and training sets, has made the air gap a very attractive proposition for a much wider range of people.
Right, because if it is not on the network, it cannot be hacked remotely. That is the basic premise. But I want to start with that first part of his question. Who is doing this now? We know about the power plants and the military, but where else is this showing up?
Well, think about the huge surge in local large language models we saw through twenty twenty-four and twenty twenty-five. Companies are terrified of their proprietary data leaking into a public cloud or being used to train someone else's model. So, we are seeing high-end legal firms, medical research labs, and even boutique financial houses running completely isolated clusters. They have these massive local workstations, like the ones we talked about back in episode two hundred sixty-nine, and they want them totally disconnected from the outside world to ensure that not a single bit of intellectual property leaves the room.
It is almost like a digital vault. But it is not just about the data staying in, right? It is also about the system staying stable.
Exactly. In industrial environments, which we touched on in episode two hundred forty-six when we looked at IT versus operational technology, an air gap is often about preventing unplanned changes. If your system is running a delicate chemical process or a high-speed assembly line, you do not want a random Windows update or a sudden cloud API change to break your workflow. Stability is security in those worlds.
Okay, so the "who" has expanded from just soldiers and engineers to lawyers, doctors, and AI developers. But that brings us to the logistics. This is the part that always breaks my brain. If I have a computer that is physically disconnected from the internet, how do I actually maintain it? How do I get a security patch onto a machine that can't see the outside world?
This is where we get into the world of the sneakernet. And no, that is not a new brand of athletic wear. It is the literal act of walking data from one place to another using physical media. But in a professional, high-security environment, you don't just plug in a random USB stick you found in the parking lot. There is a very rigid, multi-stage process involved.
I imagine it involves a lot of scanning and "clean rooms" for data?
Precisely. Usually, you have what is called a staging or a "low-to-high" transfer station. You download your updates or your new software on a machine that is connected to the internet, but that machine is essentially a sacrificial lamb. It is heavily locked down. Once the data is there, you move it to a "sheep dip" station. This is a standalone, non-networked computer whose only job is to scan that physical media with multiple antivirus engines, often five or six different ones from different vendors, to look for any known signatures of malware.
Wait, so the "sheep dip" is like a digital decontamination chamber?
That is a great analogy. It is looking for anything suspicious. But even then, you are not done. For really high-security stuff, they use what is called Content Disarm and Reconstruction, or CDR. Instead of just scanning a file and saying it looks okay, a CDR system will actually pull the file apart. If it is a PDF, it strips out all the macros, the embedded JavaScript, and the metadata, and then it rebuilds a "clean" version of that PDF from scratch. You aren't moving the original file; you're moving a reconstructed twin that is guaranteed to be inert.
That sounds incredibly labor-intensive. I can see why people only do this for the most critical systems. But what about the OS itself? If I need to update the Linux kernel or a Windows server build, I can't exactly "reconstruct" a binary update file like a PDF, can I?
No, you can't. For those, you rely on cryptographic signatures. Every piece of software from a reputable vendor is digitally signed. The air-gapped system will have the public keys of those vendors stored locally. When you bring in an update on your verified, sheep-dipped physical media, the air-gapped machine checks the signature. If even one bit of that update has been altered, the signature won't match, and the system will refuse to install it.
So it's a chain of trust. But man, the human element here seems like the biggest weak point. You are relying on a person to follow all those steps every single time.
You hit the nail on the head, Corn. Human error is the number one threat to an air gap. That is actually how Stuxnet worked, which Daniel mentioned. It didn't fly through the air; it traveled on a thumb drive that someone plugged into a machine they shouldn't have. But before we get deeper into the Stuxnet-style threats and how we've evolved to stop them, let's take a quick break for our sponsors.
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...Alright, thanks Larry. I think I'll stick to my regular hoodie for now, even if it doesn't block five-G signals.
Yeah, I am not sure how much signal protection alpaca wool actually provides. Anyway, back to the serious stuff. We were talking about Stuxnet and the evolution of air-gap security.
Right. Stuxnet was the big wake-up call back in twenty ten. It showed that an air gap isn't a magical shield if your adversary is determined enough to use social engineering or supply chain attacks. So, what has changed since then? If I'm a security admin in twenty twenty-six, how am I stopping the next Stuxnet?
The biggest shift has been moving away from "simple" physical isolation toward what we call "unidirectional security gateways," or data diodes. This is a fascinating piece of hardware. Imagine a fiber optic cable where the light can only travel in one direction. There is literally no physical way for a signal to go back the other way.
So, you can send data out of the secure network to a monitoring station, but nothing can ever come back in through that same pipe?
Exactly. It uses a specialized LED on one side and a photocell on the other. There is no return path. No handshake, no acknowledgment packets, nothing. This allows you to export logs and performance data so you can monitor the health of your air-gapped system from the outside without ever opening a door for an attacker to crawl through.
That handles the "data out" part, but Daniel was asking about the "data in" part. When you eventually have to bring in that external info, like a new AI model weights file or a critical security patch, what is the protocol?
For "data in," we've moved toward very controlled, audited "kiosks." Think of it like a digital airlock. You plug your media into an external kiosk. It does the multi-engine scanning and the CDR reconstruction we talked about. Then, instead of a human carrying a thumb drive, the data might be transferred across a specialized, one-way link into a "buffer" zone. In that buffer zone, the data is scanned again by a completely different set of tools. Only after it passes both gates does it get moved into the inner sanctum.
It sounds like a lot of bureaucracy, but for bits and bytes.
It is! And there's also the concept of "ephemeral media." Instead of using the same USB stick over and over, you use write-once media like a high-capacity Blu-ray or a specialized hardware-encrypted drive that self-destructs or wipes itself after a single use. This prevents the "lateral movement" that made Stuxnet so effective, where a virus could hop from a secure computer back onto the USB drive and then infect the next machine it touched.
That makes a lot of sense. You're basically treating every piece of incoming data as a potential bomb until proven otherwise. But I want to circle back to the GitHub thing. Why are we seeing so many developers optimizing for air gaps now? I saw a project the other day that was a full local search engine designed to run on an air-gapped Raspberry Pi cluster.
It is a response to the "Cloud Fatigue" of twenty twenty-four. We saw so many high-profile data breaches and so many instances of companies changing their terms of service to say "all your data belongs to our AI training bot now." Developers are building for the "Sovereign Individual" or the "Sovereign Enterprise." If you can run your own LLM, your own search engine, and your own development environment entirely locally, you have total control.
And the hardware has finally caught up, right? You don't need a mainframe anymore.
Exactly. With the latest N-P-U chips—the Neural Processing Units—that we're seeing in twenty twenty-six, you can run a very capable seventy-billion parameter model on a high-end consumer workstation. If you're a developer working on something sensitive, like a new encryption algorithm or a proprietary trading bot, why would you ever want that machine connected to the internet? The risk-to-reward ratio has flipped. The "convenience" of the cloud is no longer worth the "risk" of exposure.
I've noticed that a lot of these GitHub projects are also focusing on "reproducible builds." Does that play into the air-gap world?
Oh, absolutely. That is a huge part of the maintenance puzzle. If you are in an air-gapped environment, you can't just run a command like "npm install" or "pip install" and hope for the best. You need to know exactly what every single dependency is. A reproducible build ensures that if you compile the code today, and I compile it tomorrow on a different machine, we get the exact same binary, bit for bit.
So you can verify the integrity of your software without needing to check in with a central server?
Precisely. You bring in your "vendored" dependencies—which is just a fancy way of saying you've downloaded all the libraries and tucked them into your project folder—and you verify their hashes. It gives you a closed loop. You have the source code, you have the dependencies, and you have a deterministic way to build the final product. No internet required.
It's a very different mindset. It's almost like going back to the way software was distributed in the nineties, with physical discs and manual installs, but with modern cryptographic security layered on top.
It really is. It’s "High-Tech Retro." And honestly, it’s a healthy discipline. It forces you to actually understand your supply chain. Most developers today have no idea how many thousands of tiny sub-libraries are being pulled into their projects every time they hit "build." In an air-gapped world, you have to know. You have to be intentional.
I can see how that would actually make the software better in the long run. Less "bloatware" and fewer "hidden" vulnerabilities. But let's talk about the downsides. What happens when something goes wrong? If I'm in an air-gapped lab and my system starts acting up, I can't just Google the error code.
That is the biggest hurdle. The "Knowledge Gap." To run a successful air-gapped operation, you have to maintain a local library of documentation. We're talking terabytes of mirrors for Stack Overflow, official documentation, and technical manuals. Some organizations even run a local version of a generative AI, trained specifically on technical docs, to act as an "offline assistant" for their engineers.
Wait, so they have a "Local GPT" whose only job is to be the help desk?
Yes! And because it's air-gapped, they can feed it all their internal proprietary manuals and schematics without worrying about that info leaking. It becomes a very powerful tool. But it requires a lot of "data gardening." You have to constantly curate and update that local knowledge base.
"Data gardening." I like that. It sounds much more peaceful than "systems administration." But it really highlights that an air gap isn't a "set it and forget it" solution. It's a commitment to a specific way of working.
It’s a lifestyle choice for your data. You’re choosing security over convenience, every single day. And for many, especially in twenty twenty-six, that is becoming a very easy choice to make.
So, to summarize for Daniel and everyone else wondering about this: Air-gapping is moving into the mainstream because of the massive value of local AI and the desire for total data sovereignty. Maintenance is handled through a rigorous "sneakernet" process involving "sheep dip" stations, data diodes, and cryptographic verification. And we stop the next Stuxnet by treating every single bit of incoming data as a potential threat and using hardware-level unidirectional gates.
Spot on. It’s about building a fortress, but one that still has a very secure, very heavily guarded mail slot.
Well, this has been a fascinating look into a world I usually only see in spy movies or on obscure GitHub repos. It is amazing how much the definition of "standard security" is changing.
It really is. And hey, if you've been enjoying these deep dives into the weirder corners of technology, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your podcast app or over on Spotify. It genuinely helps other curious minds find the show.
Definitely. We love seeing this community grow. You can find all our past episodes, including the ones we mentioned today about mainframes and radio frequency hygiene, at our website, myweirdprompts.com. There is also a contact form there if you have a question or a prompt of your own you'd like us to tackle.
Or you can just find us on Spotify. We’re always there. Thanks for the prompt, Daniel. It was a great excuse to dig into the latest in unidirectional gateways.
Thanks for listening to My Weird Prompts. We will be back next week with another deep dive into the obscure and the interesting.
Until then, keep your data safe and your curiosity active.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Happy twenty twenty-six, everyone!
Goodbye!
