Security & Privacy

As you certainly know, your keyboard is an electronic device. It converts your physical movements (keypresses) into electrical signals to send data to your computer. As I type this sentence, the keyboard is changing my movements into codes that my Mac interprets as letters.

Naturally, this raises the question: do the electronic impulses that your keyboard generates travel through the air as well? Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland decided to test this. They say that, “Wired keyboards emit electromagnetic waves, because they contain eletronic components. These eletromagnetic radiation could reveal sensitive information such as keystrokes.” And they have proven that this is the case. In their tests, they say that “We found 4 different ways … to fully or partially recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters, even through walls. We tested 11 different wired keyboard models bought between 2001 and 2008 (PS/2, USB and laptop). They are all vulnerable to at least one of our 4 attacks.” You can see videos of their experiments.

You may think that this is the stuff of James Bond, but imagine that you are in a hotel room, and in the next room someone has a keyboard sniffer. As you type your user names and passwords, the “spy” in the next room can intercept them. Does this sound like something out of an espionage novel? Actually, we can imagine something like this being used in hardball industrial espionage, among other things.

Here’s a tip, though, if you’re worried. When you need to type a user name and password, type a few letters of the former, then switch to the next field and type a few characters of your password. Go back and forth, and even add some incorrect characters and backspaces to delete them. Sure, this is overkill of 99% of us, but for that 1% for whom security is an absolute, it may be necessary.

Of course there’s another, much more secure solution: biometrics. Using, say, a thumbprint for logging onto computers and websites. That’s not common yet, but it may be the way to go in the future.