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Hearing Passwords

September 15, 2005 by Macgyver 3 Comments

Apparently, some computer scientists at the University of California Berkeley have found a way to decipher what your password with a computer, simply by hearing it. When they typed a 10 digit password combination, the computer returned 75 different possibilities. What that means, is that they should be able to break 1 out of every 75 people’s passwords on the very first try. I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty frightening. Here are a few articles on the subject.

  • Researchers Recover Typed Text
  • Careful or they’ll hear
  • Each Tap Divulges Secret
  • Keyboard Click Now Security Threat

In addition to having your password heard, I also ran across an article from PCWorld from a couple of years ago that discusses security vulnerabilities using a wireless keyboard. From that March edition in 2003, Andrew Brandt states “Input devices that share a radio frequency can also share keystroke information across surprisingly long distances.” Anyway, who would’ve thought that there were a couple of ways like this to have your password picked up by simply typing.

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Comments

  1. John P. Hoke says

    September 16, 2005 at 10:04 AM

    I blogged about this yesterday as well, and Doug Tygar was good enough to drop by and leave the URL to his paper that describes their findings/research…

    Something to read over the weekend :)

    Reply
  2. lok-lok says

    September 15, 2005 at 9:29 AM

    we’ve been ‘dug’

    Reply
  3. daedae says

    September 15, 2005 at 9:08 AM

    Last summer at a security conference, somebody published a paper about that, or something similar to it… it uses a neural network to process the soundwaves, but originally they had a big problem with it only working well on the keyboard it was trained on.

    Reply

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