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Sonar Keyboard Logs You Out To Protect Your Data
Zothecula writes "While the simple act of logging off a workstation is an obvious way to protect sensitive data – like that used by healthcare providers, pharmacies, banks and government agencies – it is all too easy for users to forget and leave the data not only viewable, but also editable by anyone who happens to pass by. Custom keyboard supplier Key Source International (KSI) has developed a keyboard that does the remembering for you, logging out as soon as the user physically leaves the keyboard."
Simply instruct your employees on the importance of not leaving a workstation unsecured (i.e. locked, logged off, etc.). Use a 3-strike system, if you must. There really shouldn't be a need for such fancy equipment.
In the end, though, I guess it comes down to whichever method of prevention is less expensive, or less time-consuming..
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
What does "physically leave the keyboard" mean?
Not touch it any more? What if he's using the mouse?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I think I'll sneak into the office and swap all the keyboards out with these.
When I worked about a decade ago at a place where people with dubious intentions could access the work area, I ended up making a switch embedded in a seat cushion that was connected to the serial port of my workstation. When I got up, the program sitting and monitoring that port would automatically xlock the machine.
It was an ugly hack, but I never had unattended terminal issues unlike some cow-orkers.
so every time I get up to check something on my bookshelf it locks my station? seems annoying to me.
Being a performance tester, I constantly engage in risk analysis. Yes, it may $600,000 to performance test your app. How much does an hour of downtime cost you? Depending on how costly a security breach might be, the $100 keyboard (or whatever it costs) could seem like a bargain, even per employee. Smart idea.
Wouldn't a keyboard that simply locks the terminal make more sense? I don't want to be completely logged out just because I leave my desk to use the can.
These keyboards are completely hackable by dolphins.
If you work at an aquarium or have dolphin coworkers, I would avoid these keyboards.
This is going to be nightmarish for IT and it will generate all kinds of useless calls as a result. My guess is we'll be seeing some people using duct tape over the sensors on the first day too, making these expensive keyboards totally useless, apart from being a great way to inflate IT budgets, to ensure they stay plump.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Couldn't a solution using RFID be used. Basically you have a RFID detector with 1m radius of detection. The detector would poll the card to see if is there and logs you out or locks your session if you leave the zone.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
All the technology in the world won't fix staff who don't want to do what you tell them. All this will do is piss off people who have to keep going to and from their desk while in sight of their machine to get files or talk to visitors until they figure out a way to trick the keyboard into thinking they're always at their machine, at which point you've spent a lot of money for nothing.
Put reasonable security policies in place, punish your staff proportionally if they repeatedly violate them and don't try to fix people with gadgets.
Will fix the problem of these keyboards logging you out when you leave for a quick coffee. Once again, any kind of security is thwarted by duct tape.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I've been looking for this exact sort of thing and was in the middle of designing my own solution but I can't find this product available anywhere, has it even been released? Is it just a demo/prototype? What's the deal?
I hope this works better than those public toilets that flush as soon as you "leave." Reach down to tie your shoe and suddenly...*whoosh* all over you naked buttocks.
No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
For linux:
http://blueproximity.sourceforge.net/
For Win:
http://btprox.sourceforge.net/
WITH the sonar/sensor covered with black tape.
Wow, that is potentially (highly) irritating.
Imagine:
* You duck down in your chair to grab a pencil you drop ... and then you've got to take the time to log back in and for everything to load back up again. Hopefully you weren't working on something and the data got lost...
* You lean over to open a desk drawer
* You lean back to take a moment of reflection
* You step to the side (if standing) to grab something
* You're skinny and the sensors can't see you
* You (potentially) don't move enough while watching something on the screen
* You do a lot of back-and-forth in a small area (eg. a pharmacy, where you've got to fetch medications after looking them up, then come back to the next person) and leave the keyboard frequently without leaving the system uncontrolled (ie it's always in view).
A more sensible meme would be to lock the machine when the user steps away instead of logging them out, to be sure. Hopefully the sensors are accurate. Even then, there are many cases (within the designed use case) where this probably isn't appropriate or useful. Biometric logins/unlocking would likely be a bare minimum additional component, IMO.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
A research group at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University did this a while ago using the built-in speakers and microphone on most laptops.
My computer has a state of the art dynamic temporal activity sensing program that will automatically lock my workstation! I can even set it for different amounts of time!
So if at ANY time I am not doing any activity on my computer, for a period of time, say 5 or 10 or even 15 minutes (Whatever I want!) say if I get up, or fall asleep or stare out the window too long, it will automatically and magically lock up my computer. Talk about safety! Amazing!
You could just, you know, use that option that that requires a password after coming back from screensaver and set the screensaver idle timer rather low.
(By screensaver I mean turning off the monitor, I haven't used an actual screensaver since the 90s)
I just created my own motion sensing system to log you out. It melds the security of handcuffs to the authenticating power of a USB key. BAM!
Computer with sonar keyboard pings you.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
There's an exploit for it already: stickers.
I wonder if it can also be used to prevent teenagers from using the PC. Ref: "Mosquito Repels Youths" http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/05/earlyshow/living/main1095665.shtml
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
This keyboard is so great that I am now even more likely to forget my sessions open on computers that aren't equipped with it compared with before.
#!/bin/bash
#
#####
# Use 'hcitool scan' to find the MAC address of the desired bluetooth device
MACADDR="00:00:00:00:00:00"
STATE="$(hcitool name ${MACADDR})"
if [ "${STATE}" = "" ] ; then
echo "Bluetooth device not found at startup. Exiting..." >&2
exit 1
fi
LOCK="UNSET"
CHECK="$(ps -ef | grep gnome-screensaver | grep -v grep | cut -c49- )"
if [ "${CHECK}" = "gnome-screensaver" ] ; then
LOCK="gnome-screensaver-command -a"
UNLOCK="gnome-screensaver-command -d"
fi
CHECK="$(ps -ef | grep xscreensaver | grep -v grep | cut -c49- )"
if [ "${CHECK}" = "xscreensaver" ] ; then
LOCK="xscreensaver-command -lock"
UNLOCK="xscreensaver-command -deactivate"
fi
if [ "${LOCK}" = "UNSET" ] ; then
echo "Supported screensaver not running" >&2
exit 2
fi
SLEEP_TIME=15
# Enter main loop
while true ; do
if [ "${STATE}" = "" ] ; then
${LOCK}
else
${UNLOCK}
fi
sleep ${SLEEP_TIME}
STATE=$(hcitool name ${MACADDR})
done
exit 0
I guess this will put a stop to that!
In my office, it's typical for someones workstation to be vandalized by employees if left unattended AND unlocked.
alias cd="you suck"
Of course people get much more creative. We had one guy get over 40 entries added to his local host file and his mouse buttons reversed.
Automatically logging you out is a horrible idea. How many web based applications do you use in a day? Do they all auto-save your data for you? Imagine how annoying it would be when you were in the middle of writing an e-mail using a web browser, and you stepped away from your computer for a minute and lost everything? You would be in perpetual fear of accidentally moving too far away from your desk. If I was forced to use this, I would put duct tape over the sonar sensor so that it always thought there was a person there...
It's not the users work. It is the companies work. I would fire any administrator that suggested we destroy the companies work as a punishment to users that didn't do what we wanted. OK, I wouldn't fire them for suggesting it. I would point out how they are suggesting that the company's property should be destroyed. Then if they implemented it, I would fire them.
Would tape/a postcard/stickers/etc. really stop sonar? It's obviously the first thing I would try. This keyboard really looks like a waste of money unless the administrators are going to write up anyone found trying to work around the keyboard's security, which wouldn't be ideal. This seems like a keyboard more for a company where everyone understands how important security is, and is just for when you forget to lock your screen. It only takes one temporarily absentminded user to create a security hole. So, I think it's a good idea to create hardware/software precautions, just in case. But it sounds (from prior posts) as though this sonar keyboard can be hacked, which makes it useless. Also, how secure are fingerprint scanners, really? Do the hacks from the movies really work on those?
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. -Plato
Occasionally the director here will wander through and look for machines that have been left unlocked and unattended. Email is a big part of what we do, so since I started working here we've seen a couple emails sent to our department's mailing list stating more or less "Hi, I have left my computer unattended and am posing a security threat to this University."
That mailing list goes to about thirty people, all of which are more than happy to berate and tease one another. There was never a formal punishment or even a direct scolding from the director afterwards, but it made enough of an impact to make it a one time issue for the people involved. At this point, locking the machine is as much a natural part of leaving my cube as is getting out of my chair. I'd say it worked - I certainly wouldn't want that kind of attention.
We have computers at our office set to lock after 10 minutes of inactivity. People bitch and don't understand why they 'have to keep logging in'. They don't care about security. They don't care about their files because someone can restore them from backup.
Why not just a USB transducer?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
What's wrong with a screensaver password?
In the end we went with the automatic lock, the cost and bother of using other methods didn't justify having to use them. We set all the easiest to access computers to 1min, and every other computer to 5mins.
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
The only real issue with this is that if you don't regularly require bluetooth, leaving it turned on in your phone is an unnecessary drain on the battery.
btprox is overrated, tried it and found I could walk nearly anywhere in the office and the computer wouldn't lock, bluetooth has too large a range for this.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I'm sure that would work GREAT in a hospital setting where a nurse keying in data has to jump up and run down the hall to a patient who is crashing..... and then gets fired because she forgot to log herself out on 3 occasions. /sarcasm
Used to do healthcare IT. I wrote a gizmo that would clear the user's Kerberos ticket when they walked away for more than, I think, 15 seconds, using a serial/IR dongle taped to the top of the monitor. The nice thing about the Kerberized sessions were that lacking a ticket one could not proceed, but it didn't log the user out of the application either. So, a nurse running for a code blue could resume by typing in her password when she returned.
A prototype was as far as it got - automatic flush toilets were new in the building (late 90's) and everybody in the clinical applications group called it the auto-flush feature, so it never went anywhere. Real mature group, I quit after being asked to trade patient safety for reduced license costs.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The tech doesn't have to be quite so "high." You just need a magnetic receptacle at the terminal. Attached to your belt, on a tether, is a little magnetic bead. When you sit down, you put the bead in the receptacle and the terminal activates. When you get up and walk away the bead pops out and the terminal locks.
They've had this kind of thing on watercraft forever. If you're thrown from the boat, the tether pops and the ignition cuts.
I think a lot of the forgetting has to do with the multi-step lock process that most people seem to be taught (Control+Alt+Delete then "Lock") rather than pressing Windows + L
I have way too many things open to be logging out all the time --- it's a royal pain and I lose too much state, so I just lock the screen when I leave. It was easy to build the habit as for a while I had a co-worker who was a joker who had a warped sense of humor, so I was careful to make sure he never had a chance to screw anything up. It's now a reflex...
Why can't they jut make a simple, reasonably-sized USB proximity dongle that sends a Windows+L keystroke (instead of using stupid third party "lockscreens").
Bow before me, for I am root.
Sweet. I've been looking for a better way to time bathroom breaks (monitoring cam footage is tedious).
How is this solution better than a screensaver with the 'lock after X mins of inactivity' option?
Ask me about repetitive DNA
The badge will be left sitting on the keyboard and finger print scanners can be fooled by a simple black and white photocopy of the users finger print. What little improvement the vendor may or may not have provided with the sonar feature was quickly eliminated by the introduction of convenience features made to alleviate what would obviously become tedious shortly after installation.
If the data truely needs that kind of security the answer is simple. When the inactivity time limit is reached and the machine is locked, a supervisor needs to be notified, and incident filed. The manager should have to find the machine and verify that no one is there illicitly using the station and then follow up with the employee, possibly with formal documentation. Employees would learn to lock their computers almost immediately.
At my workspace we use the much simpler method of policing ourselves. When we see someones walked away we quickly send out an email on their behalf declaring they will be bringing the donuts tomorrow. I'm sure many other shops do the same as it works quite well.
USB connectivity for the receiving station and an ID card sized tag you wear.You could configure optional automatic login as you walked up to a machine, or use it in two-factor mode, and it would automatically lock the machine as you walk away. It actually worked pretty well. I looked at them 10 years ago but the price was to steep for me.
If properly tuned... that is ... or else I see disaster looming...
--
http://www.twilightcampaign.net/
I wrote a very small, very simple batch script almost 10 years ago that will run on windows xp and 7 (probably on Vista as well but never bothered testing it as I never bothered using Vista) that will lock the screen of a computer. I simply used the windows built-in task manager to configure it to run after the system was idle for 5 minutes. I found this a very efficient way to protect anything a user might leave open when they step away from their terminal. If 5 minutes is too long for you, you can give task manager a shorter time frame too. Very simple, very direct and requires no special hardware that can foul up things.
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.