Laser Sniffing Captures Typed Keystrokes From 50-100 Feet 146
Death Metal writes "Chief Security Engineer Andrea Barisani and hardware hacker Daniele Bianco used handmade laser microphone device and a photo diode to measure the vibrations, software for analyzing the spectrograms of frequencies from different keystrokes, as well as technology to apply the data to a dictionary to try to guess the words. They used a technique called dynamic time warping that's typically used for speech recognition applications, to measure the similarity of signals. Line-of-sight on the laptop is needed, but it works through a glass window, they said. Using an infrared laser would prevent a victim from knowing they were being spied on." (This is the same team that was able to pick up the electromagnetic signals emitted by PS/2 keyboards.)
on the contrary: !Easy to dectect (Score:4, Informative)
If you go blind while you are typing, you are probably being sniffed.
Or you are having severe problems with your retinas.
In either case, you should feel your way to an opthamologist quickly.
Actually, Infrared lasers only hurt eyes if you look directly into them. Using a low-powered infrared laser pointed at a keyboard wouldn't be any different than using a red laser pointed at a keyboard except that the victim would see the dot. Unless they're using a mirrored keyboard the light would be diffused and not refracted so it would be similar to looking at a resultant red dot from a laser instead of directly into a laser.
Re:on the contrary: !Easy to dectect (Score:3, Informative)
> Actually, Infrared lasers only hurt eyes if you look directly into them.
Someone could mistake what you are saying, so let me state the following: there is no eye-safe wave length.
The wave-length of the laser only decides which kind of injury it might inflict to your eye, when the energy density is high enough. Granted, for UV wavelengths a lower energy density is dangerous, but the difference between visible light and infra-red can be neglected. Which is comes similar to what you are saying next.
> Using a low-powered infrared laser pointed at a keyboard wouldn't be any different than using a red laser pointed at a keyboard except that the victim would see the dot.
Granted, a sufficiently low powered infra-red laser wouldn't cause any more harm than a visible laser (green or red).
But, looking inadvertantly in the red laser triggers the eye reflex, something what infra-red light would not, as you don't perceive it. So, a NIR can be more dangerous.
So a common 1mW visible light laser is class 2, while the 1mW infra-red is class 3, because you simply wouldn't notice, that your eye is blinded.
Re:on the contrary: !Easy to dectect (Score:3, Informative)
Is it common for double-pane glass to contain anything that could be called a vacuum? I'll admit I don't know but I always thought they just had regular atmospheric-pressure air between the panes, as an extra layer of insulation.
A vacuum would be great for stopping heat loss, but isn't present in any normal double pane window. Atmospheric pressure (14 lbs/sq in) * the number of sq inches in a window pane is a big number. Any pane that didn't break would be noticeably bowed.
Some higher end double pane windows are filled with argon, since it insulates better than standard air.
They're filled with N2, Ar or plain air. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent post is correct. I work for a window manufacturer and our IG units are only ever filled with normal air, nitrogen, or argon.
("IG units" are insulated glass units, AKA double pane windows, and consist of two lites of glass with a spacer between them. They are sealed shut with PIB and silicone.)
It's possible that they're confused by part of the manufacturing process where the IG units go through a vacuum chamber which removes all the air, before filling the units with nitrogen or argon and sealing them. But I'm quite sure we don't make any vacuum filled units. And even if we did, I have to think that at least some sound would be transmitted through the spacer that holds the two lites of glass apart.
As if the bow wouldn't be bad enough, the vacuum would cause the windows to explode even more violently than they already do if they were broken. As someone who has seen tempered lites of glass around 6' x 9' explode, I can tell you that your living room would already be a mess of broken glass if a picture window like that broke. You really don't want a vacuum in there to make things worse. Especially given that a window that size would likely be made out of 6 mm glass...
Well, I guess if someone was crazy enough to make a window like that, they'd use laminated glass. At least, I hope they would. Our customers are always trying to push the limits of how big you can allow a lite to get before it has to be thicker ...
Re:Cooler than van-Eck phreaking (Score:2, Informative)