Forget about watching, Big Brother may be listening. Sounds from typing on computer keyboards are distinctive enough to be decoded, allowing security breaches caused by "acoustic snooping," University of California, Berkeley researchers said on Wednesday.
The researchers said they were able to feed sound recordings of typing on keyboards into a computer and use an algorithm to recover up to 96 percent of the keyboard characters entered by typists.
"It's a form of acoustical spying that should raise red flags among computer security and privacy experts," said Doug Tygar, a Berkeley professor of computer science and information management.
"If we were able to figure this out, it's likely that people with less honourable intentions can - or have - as well," Tygar said.
The research builds on earlier work by International Business Machines Corp researchers who were able to recover 80 percent of text from keyboard recordings.
That research relied on the same typist using the same keyboard and an algorithm trained with known text and corresponding sound samples.
By contrast, the algorithm in the Berkeley study adapts to typing patterns of multiple typists and overcomes background noise such as music or ringing cell-phones. Also, no special recording equipment was required; keystroke noise could be recorded using off-the-shelf gear.
Comments
Comments are closed.