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All Your Keystrokes Are Belong To Us

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I stumbled upon this paper while doing my weekly browse through articles on CleverCS. To quote from the abstract:

... a novel attack taking as input a 10-minute sound recording of a user typing English text using a keyboard, and then recovering up to 96% of typed characters...

They even run the recovered text through a spell-checker which successfully corrected a mistake in the text as it was originally typed lol.

Pretty cool idea although I figure if you can sneak a microphone into a building—say by sending someone a bunch of flowers or a promotional desk-lamp, etc.—you can probably just as easily "upgrade" someone's "faulty" keyboard and record keystrokes that way instead.

Comments

There was a technology from 1970s used by intelligence agencies which captured (from withing a certain radius) and filtered tiny electromagnetic signals produced when typing the keys (or produced when it apppeared in screen - i dont remember) and re created the typed text

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