Researchers Sniff Keystrokes From Thin Air, Wires 217
narramissic writes "Two separate research teams have found that the electromagnetic radiation that is generated when a computer keyboard is tapped is actually pretty easy to capture and decode. Using an oscilloscope and an inexpensive wireless antenna, the Ecole Polytechnique team was able to pick up keystrokes from virtually any keyboard, including laptops — with 95 percent accuracy over a distance of up to 20 meters. Using similar techniques, Inverse Path researchers Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco picked out keyboard signals from keyboard ground cables. On PS/2 keyboards, 'the data cable is so close to the ground cable, the emanations from the data cable leak onto the ground cable, which acts as an antenna,' Barisani said. That ground wire passes through the PC and into the building's power wires, where the researchers can pick up the signals using a computer, an oscilloscope and about $500 worth of other equipment. Barisani and Bianco will present their findings at the CanSecWest hacking conference next week in Vancouver. The Ecole Polytechnique team has submitted their research for peer review and hopes to publish it very soon."
Guess what (Score:2, Funny)
Upgrade to USB. Try to sniff that.
Re:Guess what (Score:5, Insightful)
They could still do it through wireless. The keys emit a signal that can be picked up no matter what connection the keyboard has to the computer.
For all you paranoid conspiracy theorists out there that are busy shitting bricks, I will be developing a USB based jamming device that will saturate the area with dummy signals. Please send $100 via brown paper bag on doorstep courier.
Re:Guess what (Score:5, Funny)
Real data thieves don't even bother with a keystroke sniffer: they know the sound of each key, so they only have to hear your password being typed to know it.
Re:Guess what (Score:5, Informative)
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Heh... I guessed it was possible, but I hadn't figured it had been done already!
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Oh great, now I have to sound-proof my Faraday Cage.
Re:Guess what (Score:5, Informative)
A surefire way to get around keyboard monitoring is not to use one. It is admittedly rather tedious, but if you have good cause to be concerned about security, you can use an on-screen keyboard. As far as I know, they can't obtain the necessary information by monitoring your mouse signals.
Martus [martus.org], a package aimed at human rights workers who need to keep their activities secret from hostile governments, includes an on-screen keyboard.
Re:Guess what (Score:5, Funny)
A surefire way to get around keyboard monitoring is not to use one. It is admittedly rather tedious, but if you have good cause to be concerned about security, you can use an on-screen keyboard.
Tempest.
In future ITSO announcements:
Your pass-group must contain one of each of the following:
Re:Guess what (Score:4, Interesting)
One second while I tune my antennas to your monitor frequency.
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OR you can use speech recognition!!!!!
Re:Guess what (Score:5, Funny)
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This only works if software is running on your host? Well, there are plenty of circumstances in which people can't install software on your system but could be monitoring EM from outside. In those circumstances, then, use of an on-screen keyboard is secure, isn't it?
Also, granted that one can pick up mouse signals, don't they just indicate how much the mouse moved and the direction? If so, in order to translate that into key strokes, you need to know not only the layout of the on-screen keyboard, which y
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A surefire way to get around keyboard monitoring is not to use one. It is admittedly rather tedious, but if you have good cause to be concerned about security, you can use an on-screen keyboard. As far as I know, they can't obtain the necessary information by monitoring your mouse signals.
Instead 'they' only need to look at your screen (or set up a vid camera) to get you password. Screen keyboards are not any more secure.
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There are a great many circumstances in which you can be sure that no one else is in the room and that no video camera can see your screen but in which electromagnetic monitoring is possible. So, yes, there are ways of spying on someone using an on-screen keyboard, but in many circumstances it is far more secure than a regular keyboard.
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Except that if you use TFT screens they can be detected and decoded wirelessly...
Re:Guess what (Score:5, Funny)
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Real data thieves ... only have to hear your password
Damn, and here I thought I was safe because my voice is my password...
Verify me.
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For all you paranoid conspiracy theorists out there that are busy shitting bricks, I will be developing a USB based jamming device that will saturate the area with dummy signals. Please send $100 via brown paper bag on doorstep courier.
I'm interested in buying one of your devices. There are... agencies... who would be very interested to know what I know.
What? You want my address? WHY? No, I can't come and pick it up, THEY'll see me. Courier companies report to the NSA so I can't use one of them. None of my friends can be trusted, I know two of them are spies for Botswana independence movement... WHO ARE YOU? WHAT DO YOU WANT? Is this to do with case 44318? Oh god, that twinkie WAS a tracking device, wasn't it?
...cash is too traceable,
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The parent jests, but this might actually work.
With the USB protocol you could easily send thousands of fake reports per second and the PC would simply ignore them. Ideally this would be done by the keyboard controller, which if you want to DIY it could be replaced with an AVR microcontroller.
The signal to noise ratio would then be pretty high, making it much harder to sniff genuine keystrokes since the only difference between the fake reports and the genuine ones could be as little as one bit (e.g. in the
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needs another tag (Score:4, Insightful)
This needs a Van Eck tag, for Stephenson's Cryptonomicon bit.
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What is this "Va Neck" you speak of?
Re:needs another tag (Score:5, Informative)
From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
"Van Eck phreaking is the process of eavesdropping on the contents of a CRT display by detecting its electromagnetic emissions".
Also worth checking: open-source Van Eck phreaking implementation [sourceforge.net].
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It was a joke.
Slashdot's tag system doesn't support whitespace or capitalization, so "Van Eck" could also be read as "Va Neck".
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Oh... Duh, silly me... Sorry about that.
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It was also actually done, in 1985, by Van Eck. While Cryptonomicon might overstate the situation a bit, the entire "Van Eck" thing is quite true.
Much ado about nothing? (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like a TEMPEST in a teapot to me.
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Sounds like a TEMPEST in a teapot to me.
Sounds like a TEMPEST in a teapot to me.
Nothing you say? Here's the part where I tell you I knew what you typed before it posted.
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> Sounds like a TEMPEST in a teapot to me.
> Sounds like a TEMPEST in a teapot to me.
Nothing you say? Here's the part where I tell you I knew what you typed before it posted.
No way, man, that's just because I surf in full duplex!
8N1 fo life!
Re:Much ado about nothing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, and wasn't there a declassified NSA thing about just this late last year?
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Re:Much ado about nothing? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Much ado about nothing? -pretty much (Score:3, Interesting)
USN has been doing it for years so has the german MAD
remember security is an illusion
regards
John Jones
"TEMPEST: A Signal Problem" (Score:3, Informative)
You are correct. See
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/nsa-releases-se.html [wired.com]
for a summary and see
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_spectrum/tempest.pdf [nsa.gov]
for the recently declassified document. The discovery of this problem is dated to 1943.
LOL, yeah (Score:5, Informative)
You beat me to it. DOD has had a whole system (TEMPEST) for classifying this kind of EM emissions from secured systems at least since the mid 1980's. Nothing new about it at all. I recall working for a particular defense contractor where we had an entire 'black area' of the plant that was TEMPEST rated. Independent filtered power, EMF shielding everywhere, etc. It was pretty expensive to set up too.
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You could spend 2 billion dollars shielding something, or you could spend $144 an hour paying ~20 people minimum wage to sit on myspace, irc, and twitter all day and space them around your complex.
Possibly (Score:2)
But then if you are required to comply with certain specifications by contract with DOD, it doesn't actually matter WHAT the rules are. You either comply or you get kicked off the contract.
Besides, there is a lot more to that kind of thing than just EMSEC. Those black areas are highly secure, physically, electronically, etc. Nobody goes in or out with anything on them, no electronics of any kind go in or out, no network links, no phones, no nothing.
There are of course various levels to these things, but you
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There are of course various levels to these things, but you will NOT find classified data scattered around on systems outside a secured area.
Perhaps a better way to put it, you shouldn't find red data on a black network.
Honestly, it's hard to mess that up under almost all circumstances. It takes someone completely brain-dead, or malicious, to mix the two.
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You should most certainly *not* consider "cover signals" as adequate against EM-leak eavesdropping.
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You could spend 2 billion dollars shielding something, or you could spend $144 an hour paying ~20 people minimum wage to sit on myspace, irc, and twitter all day and space them around your complex.
With all the TVs, cars, airplanes, cell phones, motorcycles, powerlines, CB radios.... etc. Do you really think an extra 20 signals is going to slow anyone down?
BTW, would you get those 20 people to follow all of your TEMPEST devices around to provide noise? Strap them to the roof of your hmmwv? Stuff em behin
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Point.Maybe if we brought workers over from lilliput...
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My work does this... and I'm pretty sure it's working.
Re:LOL, yeah (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, the university I worked at did some government work and actually used a mechanically isolated power system. Basically they had a big motor (or several, actually) and it was directly connected to a generator (with a flywheel I think). This meant a totally independent power loop as inside the building, and the flywheel smoothed out any spikes. Obviously not highly efficient, but a good way to decouple for security and safety purposes.
Good news, tinfoil hat crowd! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, just in case... (Score:2, Funny)
I will have to type "I know you're eavesdropping" every few sentences.
http://xkcd.com/525/ [xkcd.com]
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Won't help. They also know where to buy $5 wrenches.
http://xkcd.com/538/ [xkcd.com]
Fools.... (Score:2, Funny)
Two separate research teams have found that the the electromagnetic radiation that is generated when a computer keyboard is tapped is actually pretty easy to capture and decode.
...We at the NSA have known this for years.
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I can't imagine this story being news to Hertz or Marconi.
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Everybody has known this for years, except, it seems, the guys and girls at Polytechnique and their grant committee.
As a reminder (Score:5, Informative)
Publishing is one of the first steps in peer review.
Thank you.
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Mouse (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exactly why I do all my typing with my mouse on an on-screen virtual keyboard. It's much faster too.
On a serious note, it is ironic that literally broadcasting a bluetooth signal over-the-air between a wireless keyboard and computer is apparently more secure than a hardwired keyboard.
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This is exactly why I do all my typing with my mouse on an on-screen virtual keyboard. It's much faster too.
On a serious note, it is ironic that literally broadcasting a bluetooth signal over-the-air between a wireless keyboard and computer is apparently more secure than a hardwired keyboard.
Well, it makes sense... after all, WEP is "Wired Equivalent Protection"... It's only when we're actually paying attention that this information is floating out into space that people really seem to notice or care that there are security issues.
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Bluetooth doesn't use WEP, does it? I thought WEP was only for wlans.
This is true... however the idea that the original WLAN encryption was stated to be "wired equivalent", and ended up actually being super weak... from this it kind of suggests that "wired equivalent" isn't a very strong transmission security in the first place.
The idea here is that only when transmissions are made explicitly for communication do many people even think about the security of those transmissions. I mean... who would think to encrypt keyboard input data from a wired keyboard to the computer?
Re:Mouse (Score:5, Insightful)
One might also note that the PS/2 port is electrically compatible with the old AT keyboard that debuted in 1984, on a system with a 6MHz 8086. Not exactly an era where the computational cost of encrypting local busses was even remotely sensible.
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This is exactly why I do all my typing with my mouse on an on-screen virtual keyboard. It's much faster too.
I was going to make a "Dad, is that you?" joke here, but my Dad's mouse movement is almost as bad as his typing speed.
Seriously though, how badly do you type to find that selecting characters via the mouse to be quicker?
thin air: the new menace (Score:5, Funny)
I couldn't help but think of drugs when I read the headline: Researchers sniffing lines of keystrokes, complaining about how thin the air has gotten since when they were young. By god, back then the electrons were so thick they had to use thick 8 gauge wiring to make anything work. Why, these days, the electrons have been used and re-used so much that we can use 24ga wiring for communications. Hey, are you gonna finish that line of qwertyuiop?
Re:thin air: the new menace (Score:5, Funny)
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Just build a faraday cage around your house.
It's not as hard as you might think, stucco is plaster on chicken wire wrapped around the house...
8 gauge wire (Score:4, Interesting)
By god, back then the electrons were so thick they had to use thick 8 gauge wiring to make anything work.
Some years ago I waked into a computer store to buy a hard drive. Along one of the walls was a series of glass displays containing a small selection of vintage computer equipment. One of the displays contained a gigantic object that looked like it would take two men to shift. It consisted of a really massive looking cast metal casing out of which protruded some disks, arms, some clumsy looking circuit boards and the thing was powered by a quite sizeable 220 volt electric motor of the type one is used to seeing attached to a really big fat lumber saw. I had to take a few steps back before I realised the thing was a (8 GB as it turned out) hard drive from the early 80s and not a piece of industrial machinery with it's panelling removed. I walked out of that place with a 20 Gb hard drive in my hand. Kind of makes one marvel over how far we have come in terms of miniaturisation.
Will they be allowed to present their stuff? (Score:2, Interesting)
I doubt these folks will be allowed to present their stuff. As a lay man, I cannot see a genuine use of this technology without breaking the law. I hope they will present.
When a product based on this technology is manufactured, the manufacturer could face a law suit on these grounds:
The defendant manufactured a product which on usage as intended by manufacturer, breaks the law. That's tough.
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There's significant legal use for keyboard sniffing. Parents watching children and employers watching employees on company computers are both legal in the US.
As with ALL security research (Score:4, Insightful)
As a lay man, I cannot see a genuine use of this technology without breaking the law.
As with ALL security research there's ALWAYS one legal use: Using the info and techniques to find ways to defend yourself against bad guys who use the techniques against you and to test that your defenses are adequate.
Re:As with ALL security research (Score:4, Insightful)
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...unless you're in Germany.
Just because it's legit doesn't mean it's legal. B-(
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How thin is the air, up there where you're at, that you somehow believe that they wouldn't be allowed to present? Why is that "tough"
Since when does the Canadian government ask whether there is a "genuine use of [a] technology without breaking the law" before they pre-emptively restrict free speech? I'm pretty sure that they don't--go wikipedia it, yourself, and come back and tell me if I'm wrong, OK?
So where did you get this idea that somebody could stop their presentation/publishing?
* You may be
Van Eck phreaking? (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is different, though, from Van Eck Phreaking. VEP is based on the idea of intercepting video from the person's monitor, whereas this is basically a remote keylogger. Both capture information via electromagnetic radiation, but it sounds like this has a higher signal to noise ratio.
Phreaking (Score:4, Informative)
Nifty wiki links:
Van Eck Phreaking [wikipedia.org]
TEMPEST [wikipedia.org]
Rainbow series [wikipedia.org]
What about multiple keyboards? (Score:2)
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More keyboards makes the situation moderately more complicated, but snooping doesn't require anything especially more difficult. It's probably even possible to separate out the keystrokes based on which keyboard they came from entirely based on the characteristics of the signals.
The solution is obvious... (Score:3, Funny)
Change to Bluetooth. That'll fix 'em, by gum! Harrr! Can't fool ME that easily!
Wait... Oh, nevermind. The only solution is to shoot people with antennae. Damned criminals...
No, wait... No, wait... No, wait...
Hmm. This is interesting. Get back to you.
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.....The only solution is to shoot people with antennae....
The solution is to allow nobody anywhere at anytime to have any secrets of any kind whatsoever. Jesus Christ speaks of the time in the future of the world when all secrets will be known by everyone.
Jesus Christ said in Luke 12:2 -- For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, nor anything hidden that shall not be known. 3 Therefore whatever you have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light. And that which you have spoken in the ear
Re:The solution is obvious... (Score:4, Insightful)
What makes, eg. bidding/negotiations some form of "evil plans"? Such methods certainly require secrecy on the part of BOTH parties.
I knew this day would come (Score:5, Funny)
I knew it. Many others have been discussing the potentials for this type of eavesdropping for many years. Ha! and they laughed at me when I started protecting [businessol.com] my stuff...
This sort of snooping was used in the '70's. (Score:2, Interesting)
In 1981, my supervisor in the Air Force, based on training he had as a forward air controller in Vietnam, told me how easy it was to electronically snoop in on the keystrokes generated by electric typewriters. This was in response to my question about what the "secure typewriter" was that we were standing there looking at. So the whole concept was proven, in use, and being counter-acted, years before the Van Eck phreaking article was even published.
So I'm quite baffled by this "research" being presented wel
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[Military anecdote] So I'm quite baffled by this "research" being presented well over 30 years after that.
It can take decades for things to get declassified.
This is not news (Score:3, Informative)
Google "Tempest." Some of this has been released, some not, but this is decades old.
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
FYI: Google TEMPEST & EMI (Score:2)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=TEMPEST+EMI [google.com]
FUD (Score:5, Funny)
This is a plot by GUI users to spread fear uncertainty and doubt upon cli applications. May CLI live forever!
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Use a Dvorak keyboard. (Score:2, Funny)
Change to an Dvorak keyboard or even an foreign language keyboard "challenge" this.
However the way I type, they will have fun with all of those backspaces...
Welcome to the 60s (Score:3, Insightful)
Look up "TEMPEST", e.g. in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST [wikipedia.org] - this isn't merely "old news", this is "so ancient it dates before I was born", and I am old enough to have used punch cards.
This is why some computer rooms will never contain wireless peripherals or wireless networks or Internet connections; but will have an intimidating sign on the door, and combined biometric/keypad entry, and Faraday cages built into their walls, and a self destruct mechanism, and fences around them, and 24/7 armed guards, and a hot line to a fast-response team on a separate near-by base.
For everyone else, well, when you buy tinfoil rolls, remember to buy enough for your hat _and_ your peripherals cables :-)
Nice (Score:2)
This is news? (Score:2)
Worrying thought? (Score:2, Insightful)
Would this work with ATM keypads?
And this is new? (Score:2, Interesting)
How exactly can this be new or newsworthy?
I saw a demonstration 20 years ago almost to the day where guys from the swedish equivalent of NSA captured keystrokes from a Mac Plus at 300 meters distance (I was working in military research at the time).
As a consequence we built a room paneled entirly in copper, with copper chicken wire across the windows and baffled air vents.
Opto-couplers for the phone lines and stabilizers for the power and we were emission free. The whole TEMPEST package.
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Better get a tinfoil hat for your keyboard too.
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So does this work with laptop keyboards as well?
Gee, I don't know...
the the Ecole Polytechnique team was able to pick up keystrokes from virtually any keyboard, including laptops
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Log off, go home, log in there.
If you want the absolute safest way: never log in, ever.
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Join the Mafia?
They're more respectable than the RIAA and MPAA any day... At least they sell tangible goods. (Well, the blow is. The hookers are a service.)
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IP Geolocation can be so efficient that it's scary. This one [maxmind.com] gives my physical location to within 20 meters along with some other (correct) information. Also, Myspace can of course find the IP of one of their users. If the cops want to find me, they could get my IP from Myspace and then go to my service provider to get my real name and address.
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Which in turn sounds a lot like Tempest, which dates back to the what, 40s?