SoFunction
Updated on 2025-04-12

What is physical isolation

The first dawn of the new century has opened a new era of human civilization in the information age. The Internet is increasingly integrating into every aspect of society. On the one hand, network applications are increasingly penetrated into key areas such as government, finance, and national defense; on the other hand, the components of network users are becoming more and more diverse, and network intrusions and attacks for various purposes are becoming more and more frequent. Security guarantee capabilities are an important part of a country's comprehensive national strength, economic competitiveness and survival ability in the new century. It is no exaggeration to say that it can be compared with the importance of nuclear weapons to a country in the next century. This problem cannot be solved well, and will endanger all aspects of our country's political, military, economic and social life in an all-round way, putting the country under threat of information warfare and high economic risks.

The security threats faced by the network can be roughly divided into two types: one is a threat to network data; the other is a threat to network equipment. These threats may come from various factors: malicious attacks from external and internal personnel are the biggest obstacle to the smooth development of e-commerce, government Internet engineering, etc.

Our country's security officials believe that if there is no connection to the network, the network security threat will be restricted.
Article 6 of the Confidentiality System of the "Regulations on the Confidentiality Management of International Internet of Computer Information Systems" promulgated and implemented from January 1, 2000 stipulates: "Computer information systems involving state secrets shall not be directly or indirectly connected to the international Internet or other public information networks, and must be physically isolated." Many institutions require effective protection of confidential data and prevent network attacks through physical connections between the internal environment and the hostile environment in the outside world.

What is physical isolation?
The so-called "physical isolation" means that the internal network does not directly or indirectly connect to the public network. The purpose of physical security is to protect hardware entities and communication links such as routers, workstations, and network servers from natural disasters, man-made destruction and wired eavesdropping attacks. Only by physically isolating the internal network from the public network can we truly ensure that the internal information network of party and government agencies is not attacked by hackers from the Internet. In addition, physical isolation also defines a clear security boundary for the government's internal network, making the network more controllable and easy for internal management.

Why do physical isolation need?
Before physical isolation was implemented, we had many measures for network information security, such as adding firewalls and antivirus systems to the network, conducting intrusion detection and vulnerability scanning on the network. Due to the extreme complexity and limitations of these technologies, these online analytics technologies cannot provide high data security requirements put forward by certain institutions (such as military, government, finance, etc.). Moreover, such software-based protection is a logical mechanism that is extremely easy to manipulate for logical entities. The logical entity behind refers to hackers, internal users, etc.

Because of this, our confidential network cannot completely place the security of confidential data on the protection of using probability for judgment. It must have an absolutely safe door to ensure that the information on the confidential network is not leaked or destroyed. This is the role of physical isolation.
Article entry: dnbm     Editor: dnbm