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.
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 :)
we’ve been ‘dug’
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.