Hackers can hear your keyboard!

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ThinkFree

Technomancer
LONDON: Swiss researchers have shown that computer criminals can misuse the electromagnetic signals produced by when buttons on a keyboard to ea
vesdrop on what a user types.

Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini, doctoral students from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), have been successful in analysing the signals produced by keystrokes to reproduce what a target typed.

The researchers have developed four attacks that work on a wide variety of computer keyboards, which also worked with keyboards embedded in laptops.

Their findings forced them to declare that keyboards were "not safe to transmit sensitive information".

During the study, the EPFL students tested 11 different keyboard models that connected to a computer either through a USB or through a PS/2 socket.

The team observed that all the keyboards tested by them were vulnerable to at least one of the four attacks they used.

According to them, one attack could even work over a distance of 20 metres.

The researchers revealed that they used a radio antenna in their study, which enabled them to "fully or partially recover keystrokes" by spotting the electromagnetic radiation emitted when keys were pressed.

"No doubt that our attacks can be significantly improved, since we used relatively unexpensive equipments," the BBC quoted them as saying in a web posting.

Though the details of the attacks are scant, the new study is expected to be reported in a peer-reviewed journal soon.

Source : *infotech.indiatimes.com/Personal_Tech/Hackers_can_hear_your_keyboard/articleshow/3636485.cms
 

accessranganath

Right off the assembly line
hi ,

Nice to see your opinon on this forum........
cool and send me any other articles relavant to hacking pls........


Thanks & Regards
Ranganath .Kothur
 

alexanderthegreat

Overlord v2.0
@accessranganath: Advice: NEVER publicly display your original name and other contact details on the internet!

As for the topic,(correct me if I'm wrong:D) I remember an episode from a show on National Geographic known as "I Didn't Know That!". The episode had shown a spy gadget used to capture sonic waves to eavesdrop on conversations. They had proved clearly that the gun was as big as a sniper rifle and needed the correct orientation to capture decipherable waves. Doesn't this work on the same principle?
If so, then it would be very difficult to exactly find out what is being typed as it was difficult to decipher the contents on the show too. So that "fully or partially decipher" should be "partially and sometimes fully decipher".
Another gadget for the Bond guy!

@NIGHTMARE: (Offtopic) Nice profile picture! beats mine. Gotta get image searching again!
 
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