Comment by fatfingerd
2 years ago
Not according to the article.. Microphones are sensitive enough to mount the attack on quieter keyboards.
2 years ago
Not according to the article.. Microphones are sensitive enough to mount the attack on quieter keyboards.
Microphones are surprisingly sensitive. I can listen to music in my closed-back headset at a regular volume. My desk mic can pick this up. Without boosting the audio it's barely audible that there's music, but after adding some gain you get almost the full song profile (and background noise).
I can even pick out some of my breathing from the recording.
If I turn on noise suppression and noise gate it's fine.
I was two rooms away from someone playing music on a smart Google device. I could very barely hear that music was playing at all and only just barely made out it was a song I had been interested in but kept missing. I pulled out my S22+ and used Shazam. somehow it was able to pick it up easily.
What we clearly need are louder keyboards - which overload the mic so as to render keystrokes indistinguishable.
Adding a gain knob to my keyboard, be right back.
My mechanical keyboard already has a knob that I've configured to control the system audio volume, all that's left is configuring Linux to play an audio recording of a keypress every time I press a key...
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When conducting coding interviews remotely I often switch from my mechanical keyboard to my laptop keyboard (for taking notes) because I know how annoying/distracting that sound can be on calls. Suffice it to say, having a gain knob on my mechanical keyboard would be wonderful.
I've wanted to integrate a cap gun into a keyboard, basically a an old fashioned roll of paper caps and solenoid to whack 'em, triggered by exclamation points.
Some old IBM keyboards (beamsprings, the predecessor to the Model F, which preceded the Model M) had solenoids inside to make them louder and sound more like typewriters. I wonder if such a setup would defeat this attack, or if it would still be possible to discern the actual keypress alongside the solenoid.
Not just limited to old IBM keyboards! The new reproduction Model F keyboards also have a solenoid option! It's fantastically loud with it banging on the solid metal case along with the buckling springs. Great keyboards in general.
I'm guessing it would be easier (assuming you trained it on that keyboard), because each solenoid would be fairly unique due to manufacturing tolerances. Just my gut feeling, I have no data to back it up.
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Or auto-mute upon key press.
Or just use a password manager.
Alternatively, constant random key press sounds playing in the background.