Acoustic Hacking

[chico.co.uk]

This overlaps between my hobbies and my work life, can anyone offer an opinion on this paper? Essentially it's a proposed method of hacking users passwords etc based on recording their keystrokes on an ordinary qwerty keyboard.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/paper ... eprint.pdf

Would anyone like to offer an opinion on whether this is a workable method or not?

I'm trying to figure out if it's tongue in cheek or not ... i'm very unsure

[whyterabbyt]

You'll find more than a few opinions(*) at Slashdot...

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0 ... 72&tid=218


(*) and some complete bollocks...

[.jon]

The reason to pursue these sort of methods is no tongue-in-cheek - there would be no traces.

[nuffink]

Russian eavesdropping prowess dates back at least to 1946, when Soviet schoolchildren presented a two-foot wooden replica of the Great Seal eagle emblem of the US to Ambassador Averell Harriman in Moscow.

The seal hung in the embassy for years, part of the time in the ambassadorial office, until security staff cut it open in 1952 to find an undetectable listening device the size of a pencil.

The beauty of the bug was its simplicity: a small chamber in the eagle's beak acted as a diaphragm, resonating to sound waves. There was no internal power pack or wires to betray it, but voices could be monitored using an ultra-high frequency signal beamed from a van parked nearby.

The device is thought to have stemmed from the work of Lev Termen, a Russian scientist better known for his invention in 1919 of the theremin, an electronic musical instrument that later provided the whistling effect in the Beach Boys' hit Good Vibrations. Imprisoned in Siberia in 1938, he was put to work by the intelligence services.

The fruits were not revealed until 1960 when US officials displayed the treacherous seal carving at the UN.

[chico.co.uk]

You'll find more than a few opinions(*) at Slashdot...

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0 ... 72&tid=218


(*) and some complete bollocks...

Thanks for the link ... some useful opinions there, like you say

[Rock]

Maybe the solution is to use software... if you are worried about this. Create program that produces a loud random beep (with random sonic characteristics) for each keystroke typed. Hopefully the random sound will arrive early enough to mask the physiscal sounds created by your keyboard. Of course you have to make sure your program doesn't get hacked so that your tones are no longer random. Or perhaps a program that just emmits random occurences of sounds modeled after keyboard strokes... or samples of your own keyboards carefully recorded for accuracy and played back at random intervals... or perhaps just turning up the radio and typing softly...

FWIW, I find wearing an aluminum foil hat takes care of 90% of these intrusions of my privacy.

[GaryG]

Would anyone like to offer an opinion on whether this is a workable method or not?

Well... I worked with a guy once (real über geek) who claimed he could tell what people were typing on his keyboard from the clicks because he was so familiar with it's sound...

So...maybe.

.g

[VariKusBrainZ]

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7996

[rpc9943]

WTF does this have anything to do with T2

RonC

[haydxn]

well the sound of a keyboard typing is kindof a "clack tlack tlack", and so 'Tracktion' seems like the nearest thing to it. Especially as this is all about sound. And security; the number 2 is known to be more secure than, for instance, the 5 of ableton live, the 3 of sx, etc.., so the RMS T2 forum seems like the most logical place.

[chico.co.uk]

WTF does this have anything to do with T2

RonC

Well ... this is the raw material software forum, not the T2 forum ... and raw materials make Juce, which has methods which allow you to do record, manipulate and compare audio, and methods to perform encryption, archiving etc ...

so, to answer your question ... no, it has nothing to do with T2

As an aside, if Bruce Schneier reckons it's worth worrying about, that's good enough for me