Technology

58150 readers

4399 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

439

Boffins convert typing sounds into text with 95% accuracy (www.theregister.com)

submitted 9 months ago by kpw@kbin.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

146 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Researchers in the UK claim to have translated the sound of laptop keystrokes into their corresponding letters with 95 percent accuracy in some cases.

That 95 percent figure was achieved with nothing but a nearby iPhone. Remote methods are just as dangerous: over Zoom, the accuracy of recorded keystrokes only dropped to 93 percent, while Skype calls were still 91.7 percent accurate.

In other words, this is a side channel attack with considerable accuracy, minimal technical requirements, and a ubiquitous data exfiltration point: Microphones, which are everywhere from our laptops, to our wrists, to the very rooms we work in.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Wilzax@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

I can only make that claim with as much confidence as yours that a non-standard keyboard layout would protect you. By your own argument, how can you make the claim that using a different keyboard layout will protect you? Everyone has a different typing style and their keyboards have different sound profiles, so clearly the AI needs to sample enough data from you and compare it to a dictionary to individually on audio collected of your typing. How do you know that the characteristics of the keyboard layout play an identifying role in this kind of attack when the AI has no concept of which sounds correspond to which keys until it has done its training?