The Keyboard That Could Phone Home

An anonymous reader writes "University of Pennsylvania researchers have developed a keylogger they call the JitterBug that can modulate passwords or other information into normal traffic by adding imperceptible delays to keypresses as people use keyboard and network-intensive apps like telnet and remote desktop. The idea is that the delays in keypresses cause delays in packets, and data can be encoded in those delays. There's no software or extra network activity that the victim can see, but anyone who can see the traffic (even if it's encrypted) could grab the data. Here's the scary part: the researchers say that it could be manufactured into a keyboard, making these keyloggers widespread and virtually undetectable."

Comments

Cool, where can I get the source?

[mr_stinky_britches]

Would love to see how exactly they implemented this ;)

On a more serious note though..
I always thought it was easier to just torture somebody for the password?

Okay, seriously.. is there any way that we could protect against this in hardware or software? This could be a little bit tricky. I'll let you know as soon as I come up with a solution!

/me heads off to go watch some MacGuyver/Stargate for ideas