On Sunday, August 25, 2019, 02:05:48 PM PDT, Razer <[email protected]> wrote:
On August 24, 2019 11:25:42 PM PDT, jim bell <[email protected]> wrote:
>https://www.newsbreakapp.com/n/0MbloCip?s=a3&pd=02h1yVjC
>
>Hackers can tell what people are typing just by listening through a
>smartphone's microphone
>
>Daily Mail
>
>
>Hackers could be able to tell what you are typing on your computer just
>by listening to your keystrokes through your smartphone's microphone, a
>new study warns.
>
>Shared from News Break
>
>
>>Jim Bell's comment:Peter Wright's 1970's book, Spycatcher, described an
>>early, primitive version of this technology.
>By audio waveform signatures. I always assumed this was a 'thing'.
>But if the audio is ever 'detached' from the source person's ID it becomes
>sort of useless.
I am curious how this is currently done. In Peter Wright's day (MI5), the
typewriters that would be listened to might have been IBM Selectrics. In that
system, the type ball makes multiple separate motions, rotating and changing
angle, before the character is automatically struck. That should contain a
wealth of information.
Similarly, in the kind of "daisy-wheel" typewriters (or printers) the wheel
spins around and is eventually struck. Of course, in both of these cases "you"
don't necessarily know from where the ball or wheel came.
And in the case of modern, computer keyboards, what noises is the system
looking at? The noises the keys themselves might be fairly similar; maybe it
is listening for the difference in timing that a human-generated keystroke
would exhibit.
At first thought, I figure that using Tempest-type (RF emission) techniques on
keyboards would be more plausible: The encoder chip which scans keys will
likely have precise timings. And it should be possible to program a different
encoder chip with intentional emissions of identifiable signals, which can be
listened to from a relatively long distance away, tens or hundreds of feet.
Jim Bell
