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Wireless Keylogger Masquerades as USB Phone Charger
msm1267 writes: Hardware hacker and security researcher Samy Kamkar has released a slick new device that masquerades as a typical USB wall charger but in fact houses a keylogger capable of recording keystrokes from nearby wireless keyboards. The device is known as KeySweeper, and Kamkar has released the source code and instructions for building one of your own. The components are inexpensive and easily available, and include an Arduino microcontroller, the charger itself, and a handful of other bits. When it's plugged into a wall socket, the KeySweeper will connect to a nearby Microsoft wireless keyboard and passively sniff, decrypt and record all of the keystrokes and send them back to the operator over the Web.
It raises awareness to just how insecure wireless keyboards are, so that hopefully people will stop using them for anything important.
It's not even weak obfuscation. The "key" is the mac address of the device... which is sent along with every single packet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And the "key" is xored with the plaintext to get the "encrypted" text, and the typed character is in a single byte. So you only actually need a single byte of the MAC address.
And it happens to be the first byte, which for these Microsoft keyboards is always 0xCD. So you don't even need to bother figuring out what the MAC address is.
Dang this is NOT A STORY and the claim that this can work against all Microsoft Wireless Keyboards is 100% BS, and has been since 2007, when the issue was first uncovered; covered in depth by Schneier, and remedied in all versions of the Microsoft Wireless Keyboard created since then, which use at minimum 128-bit AES; NOT XOR.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ