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Could your keyboard spy on you?

August 9th, 2006 · No Comments


Researchers say that small devices called JitterBugs could piggyback onto network connections to hand.gifdiscreetly send passwords and other sensitive data over the Internet. Like the current keylogger hardware used by the FBI and criminals alike to record passwords and other data, JitterBugs are small devices that attach to a keyboard and record what users type. Unlike current keyloggers, which store the data to internal memory, JitterBugs do not have to be retrieved before captured data can be read.

Although no such device has been found in the wild yet, researchers have developed a working prototype, and they postulate that similar ideas may have already been used in unnoticed attacks. In a paper titled "Keyboards and Covert Channels" (PDF format), University of Pennsylvania graduate students explain that the device could encode data in keystrokes by introducing an extra delay between when a key is pressed and when the keyboard tells the computer that the key has been pressed. Could your keyboard spy on you?

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