Scary AI recognizes passwords by the sound of your typing

by grammers on 12/9/2023, 10:20:58 PM with 26 comments

  • by JanneVee on 12/9/2023, 11:50:41 PM

    I read about this in the Silence on the Wire by Michal Zalewski. And you don't need a fullblown AI, a good statistical model is enough to make a guess on passwords, and if you have a bunch of probabilities to cut down your search space to a more probable set. And the book is from 2005, so I wouldn't say it is new. https://nostarch.com/silence.htm

    I even remember reading about how Clifford Stoll recognized the different attackers by "typing rhythm" in Cuckoo's Egg.

  • by nocsi on 12/10/2023, 12:29:48 AM

    This is why I use a separate keyboard to type in my password. If you don’t have a dedicated keyboard, then I suggest you have a loved one come over to enter your passwords for you. Sometimes I have my kid do it

  • by belter on 12/9/2023, 11:59:10 PM

    No details about what specific study they are referring to. These attacks are possible for several years now.

    2016 - "Don't Skype & Type! Acoustic Eavesdropping in Voice-Over-IP" - https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.09359

    2020 - "Behavioral Acoustic Emanations: Attack and Verification of PIN Entry Using Keypress Sounds" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7309150/

    Maybe they mean this one...

    2023 - "A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01074

  • by firecall on 12/10/2023, 4:13:05 AM

    And just today there is a post about the Sneakers Movie Promotional Floppy!

    Now, from memory I’m pretty sure there is a scene where the visually impaired / blind Hacker can work out the password by listening to the audio on the surveillance tape!

    I’m probably mangling my memory of the scene, so please correct me! :-)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38585213

  • by sublinear on 12/10/2023, 3:50:35 AM

    Wasn't it on-screen keyboards that were the mitigation against keyloggers way back in the day?

  • by thot_experiment on 12/9/2023, 11:12:01 PM

    Does anyone know what the SotA foss local demo of something like this is? I'd really like to try and understand first hand what the limitations are.

  • by Freedom2 on 12/10/2023, 5:29:23 AM

    This is why I don't type and dictate my passwords using voice. Never been broken into once!

  • by rvz on 12/10/2023, 5:04:22 AM

    Just use a passkey or U2F device. No password at all.

    Job done.

  • by Erratic6576 on 12/9/2023, 11:11:07 PM

    Don’t type passwords. Use 2FA whenever possible