Slashdot Mirror
Laser Sniffing Captures Typed Keystrokes From 50-100 Feet
Death Metal writes "Chief Security Engineer Andrea Barisani and hardware hacker Daniele Bianco used handmade laser microphone device and a photo diode to measure the vibrations, software for analyzing the spectrograms of frequencies from different keystrokes, as well as technology to apply the data to a dictionary to try to guess the words. They used a technique called dynamic time warping that's typically used for speech recognition applications, to measure the similarity of signals. Line-of-sight on the laptop is needed, but it works through a glass window, they said. Using an infrared laser would prevent a victim from knowing they were being spied on." (This is the same team that was able to pick up the electromagnetic signals emitted by PS/2 keyboards.)
I would have had first post, but I had to close my blinds to avoid anyone spying on my leet Slashdot posting skills.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
dynamic time warp again!
If you go blind while you are typing, you are probably being sniffed.
Or you are having severe problems with your retinas.
In either case, you should feel your way to an opthamologist quickly.
Actually, Infrared lasers only hurt eyes if you look directly into them. Using a low-powered infrared laser pointed at a keyboard wouldn't be any different than using a red laser pointed at a keyboard except that the victim would see the dot. Unless they're using a mirrored keyboard the light would be diffused and not refracted so it would be similar to looking at a resultant red dot from a laser instead of directly into a laser.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary
I don't know if that's a good enough defense. TFA says that the laser sniffing method is "analyzing the spectrograms of frequencies from different keystrokes." Once you've got a signature for each key and a large enough typing sample, your problem is reduced to a simple substitution cipher.
I hear that a pair of binoculars works well for this purpose, too. I'm told that they even work through glass.
Nah. The trick is to memorize a 4096-bit RSA keypair and encrypt your typing.
Use a keyboard which changes the entire key layout every time you press any key.
And the keystroke that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the cone... of silence.
You can't take the sky from me...
Parent post is correct. I work for a window manufacturer and our IG units are only ever filled with normal air, nitrogen, or argon.
("IG units" are insulated glass units, AKA double pane windows, and consist of two lites of glass with a spacer between them. They are sealed shut with PIB and silicone.)
It's possible that they're confused by part of the manufacturing process where the IG units go through a vacuum chamber which removes all the air, before filling the units with nitrogen or argon and sealing them. But I'm quite sure we don't make any vacuum filled units. And even if we did, I have to think that at least some sound would be transmitted through the spacer that holds the two lites of glass apart.
As if the bow wouldn't be bad enough, the vacuum would cause the windows to explode even more violently than they already do if they were broken. As someone who has seen tempered lites of glass around 6' x 9' explode, I can tell you that your living room would already be a mess of broken glass if a picture window like that broke. You really don't want a vacuum in there to make things worse. Especially given that a window that size would likely be made out of 6 mm glass...
Well, I guess if someone was crazy enough to make a window like that, they'd use laminated glass. At least, I hope they would. Our customers are always trying to push the limits of how big you can allow a lite to get before it has to be thicker ...
"stephenson's van-Eck phreaking"? I'm certain that it's van-Eck's van-Eck phreaking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking