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Traditional Keyboard Sounds Can be Decoded By Listening Over a VoIP Connection, Researchers Say (onthewire.io)
Reader Trailrunner7 writes: Researchers have known for a long time that acoustic signals from keyboards can be intercepted and used to spy on users, but those attacks rely on grabbing the electronic emanation from the keyboard. New research from the University of California Irvine shows that an attacker, who has not compromised a target's PC, can record the acoustic emanations of a victim's keystrokes and later reconstruct the text of what he typed, simply by listening over a VoIP connection.
The researchers found that when connected to a target user on a Skype call, they could record the audio of the user's keystrokes. With a small amount of knowledge about the victim's typing style and the keyboard he's using, the researchers could accurately get 91.7 percent of keystrokes. The attack does not require any malware on the victim's machine and simply takes advantage of the way that VoIP software acquires acoustic emanations from the machine it's on.
The researchers found that when connected to a target user on a Skype call, they could record the audio of the user's keystrokes. With a small amount of knowledge about the victim's typing style and the keyboard he's using, the researchers could accurately get 91.7 percent of keystrokes. The attack does not require any malware on the victim's machine and simply takes advantage of the way that VoIP software acquires acoustic emanations from the machine it's on.
While their specific research may be new, the results are hardly new. Its been nearly 11 years since more original research was released with similar results. Looks like this may be the first time Slashdot has reported this though.
Duh
can they decode the sound of keystrokes on the crappy, staticy VOIP connection when "Bob" from "Microsoft" calls from Bangalore to tell me I owe money to the IRS.
with close to zero key throw,
I imagine they're whisper silent, almost as if they were just a piece of glass.
Besides people will only be typing short security-unimportant tweets on the damn things anyway, since real long-form documents will be a pain to type.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent..."
This isn't shocking. If you can match an acoustic signature you can figure it out. There have been tons of these "research" projects coming out of Universities lately. I guess this is what passes for research nowadays. I can write a program that can identify any car that drives by with good accuracy just by recording the sound the engine makes and matching it against known engine sounds. Ridiculous.
Interesting, but the whole "espionage" angle seems exaggerated. This is kinda worthless for espionage.
You need to know the model of the keyboard, know a bit about the typing style of your victim and you need to somehow either sneak a microphone into close proximity of your victim, or hack their computer so that it is always recording and transmitting audio to you. Oh, and you need it to be relatively quiet, so spying on a crowded place is out of the question.
If you have this kind of access to your target, there are much less convoluted ways to spy on them. A simple malware package delivered via ad network (or even email -- people aren't very smart) would give you full keyboard logging capabilities plus whatever else you managed to pack in there, which would open even more avenues of exploitation.
Can I set it up so that the Mic on my own laptop can record this so I can transmit my own rants to the people I'm ranting about?
guys the text that appears in your chat window while having a skype voice connnection is not decrypted from the voice channel :-) nice try
When I use to DM I'd throw a couple dice every once in a while to keep my party thinking there was something going on that really wasn't. This could be entertaining if you knew you were being monitored.
Use naturally occurring acoustic waves instead of EM waves?
Is it patented?
4wdloop
I used a technique back in the early 1990s where anyone using internet relay chat would have their keystrokes appear on my end. It was also 100% accurate, no microphone needed, and able to capture hundreds -- no, thousands of users at a time. I could capture dozens of conversations lasting hours sorted into "channels". It was fun for a while, I really should get back into it.
</sarcasm>
so what you really mean is 'someone else already wrote a program to identify any car that drives by with good accuracy just by matching it against known engine sounds, and i can write a several-line script to call that program'
which is way less impressive than your original, misleading claim.
Sorry, but I think this news is from 90s or early 00s. I still clearly remember the effort to decode the sound of the keyboard, but then it was working with a particular keyboard and it was told that application has to be trained to decode clicks of another keyboard.
apt-get install bucklespring (there's a Mac build, dunno how do you install there -- or if you even still can install anything not from the App Store)
The author of this program has sampled the sound of every key on a real Model M, so you can install this and pretend you have a keyboard for grown-ups. On the downside, everyone in your building can learn what you type without requiring a VoIP link.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
the housefly cam that's recording video of your keyboard from the ceiling,
and the laser pointed at your office window that is recording the window vibrations as you proofread by mumbling to yourself as you write.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Researchers have known for a long time that acoustic signals from keyboards can be intercepted and used to spy on users, but those attacks rely on grabbing the electronic emanation from the keyboard.
I don't get it. What are these electronic emanations which can be acoustically picked up?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Seriously, if it was possible to effectively translate the sounds made by a keyboard, then the computers used to record Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret data would all have to be located in windowless rooms where you could not capture said sounds.
That's funny.
As if some of us on here worked in such windowless rooms back in the 70s and 80s ....
(grin)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So you have compromised the PC and rather installing a key logger, you turn on the mic to listen to the key board.