http://www.amazon.com/Silence-Wire-Passive-Reconnaissance-In...
There was also this paper (linking to summary) about figuring out how to decode the audio of someone typing on a keyboard.
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/acoustic-snooping-...
Only if you're in the habit of displaying them or typing them in or otherwise transmitting them over leaky I/O channels. If all they do is get loaded from your internal SSD to RAM, then they're pretty safe. Your passwords are what's really at risk, and any secrets that you put on screen.
http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-Neal-Stephenson/dp/00605...
Certainly it would be a big power drain, but for the security conscious it sounds like a reasonably easy short-term solution. That, and not accessing sensitive data in public, of course.
This is like securing your windshield in your car, and not worrying about the car door locks.
The people who know how to snarf your information this way, probably can hack you a dozen other ways too.
So they modified the keyboard to make it easy to detect what was typed? Not saying side-channel isn't a issue, but that's kinda silly :)
Like, if I can read Chinese as long as the strokes are clearly made, you can say that I can read Chinese. Now it's just a matter of increasing error correction to remove the qualifier.
It's only a matter of budget to be able to read the keyboard characters without modifying the driver.
Sounds to me like they modified the driver so that it had some kind of emissions pattern they could track. Driver could be modified via a virus or something.
It sounds like they just modified the driver to make those signals easier to detect. (i.e. A became 4Hz, B became 4.1Hz, etc.) If they had more sensitive detectors, maybe they wouldn't need to modify the driver.
My guess.
It would be really nice if reporting news didn't constantly require praying on the unfounded fears people have of things they don't understand.
It sounds like a stretch now, but could become a more common threat if some code is released to the script kiddies.
You spend more time trying to pilfer anything useful than would ever be useful. Then there's the whole getting caught bit; most hackers are prison-averse. The only hacking you will see at Starbucks is benign proof-of-concept stuff and research.
I've thought about why you'd target people in coffee shops / public places. There's a coffee shop in Austin near the capitol that's frequented by politicians and their associates. They often have meetings there or sit and work on their laptops. I think the reasons you'd target them are obvious.
One idea with this is using a microphone array with HARK(http://www.hark.jp/). I would be able to listen to any arbitrary keyboard press, and map them to a 3d scene. Assuming a bit of jitter, I could probably reproduce what you typed on your keyboard.
A smartphone with touchscreen would be impractical with this setup. I'm unsure regarding buttoned smartphones (slide out keyboard).
I've been working with 3d scene generation and voice decoding. I'm making a board room auto-transcripter. It would map where people are, and attach who says what, when. It also has uses also in the courtroom where a mic array could also overhear whispers the jurors say in open court, to potentially catch issues that would cause a mistrial.
Of course, this could also be taken to the 'listen to everything in the area and decode semi-private actions'.
Edit: Also it goes beyond just password interception. By following patterns of key presses you can detect things like language and even application.
Not that many people are busting out a mechanical keyboard in a coffee shop. I'm just curious.
Could you not recompile a kernel or something to make enough side channel 'noise' to jam the cpu/memory related 'signal' from your actual typing? Like the cook banging two saucepans together as Utz and the Critic talked in that flat in Prague? (Utz by Bruce Chatwin).
Heavy on battery, and might not address the pure keyboard side channel signal if I have understood the article correctly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N1C3WB8c0o
A $10 USB charger that steals MS keyboard strokes (arstechnica.com)
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/01/meet-keysweeper-the-...