Tunneling Out of the Air-Gap: Software Data Diodes for Industrial IoT
IT InstaTunnel Team Published by our engineering team Tunneling Out of the Air-Gap: Software Data Diodes for Industrial IoT In the high-stakes world of critical infrastructure — nuclear power plants, water treatment facilities, electrical grids — the ultimate defence mechanism has historically been the “air gap.” By physically disconnecting Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) networks from the public internet, organisations eliminated the theoretical threat of remote cyberattacks. If there is no wire, there is no hack. That logic is now colliding with reality on two fronts. First, the relentless pressure of Industrial IoT (IIoT): modern industrial operations require constant telemetry streams to power predictive maintenance, real-time anomaly detection, and cloud-based machine learning. Second, and more urgently, the threat landscape itself has dramatically escalated. Attacks on OT protocols rose 84% in 2025 compared to the previo...
