AI can tell what you're typing by listening to the sound of your keyboard | Hacker News Reader

AI can tell what you're typing by listening to the sound of your keyboard

theregister.com

23 pointsthisAintReal21 comments

Here is some more information about acoustic cryptanalysis, which has been used by intelligence agencies since the 1960s or so. What is new about this research is the use of AI to accomplish the side channel attack. Two decades ago the same thing made headlines when researchers used neural networks to decipher keystrokes. It is no less concerning for not bring new; I think the back story adds detail to the picture that the article only alludes to.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_cryptanalysis

> over Zoom, the accuracy of recorded keystrokes only dropped to 93 percent, while Skype calls were still 91.7 percent accurate.

That's interesting considering the fact that Skype messenger is a well-known of its good (if not best) audio codec.

voice codecs get good performance by ignoring whatever noise isn't needed to reconstruct the voice.

Yeah, kind of makes you wonder how the audio isn't same quality in both since same hardware is used.

Potential variance of codecs, bitrates, and sampling rates, for starters.

93 vs 91.7 looks like a difference caused by statiscical error, let's say 93.0±1.0 vs 91.7±1.0. Are the error intevals published somewhere?

What's described in the title of the article is old news. What might be novel, however, is the application of detecting typing on laptop keyboards. This type of detection was previously only reliable for mechanical keyboards.

So a reason to add a noise gate into your effects chain. Hard to guess what you are typing from a stream of zeros.

Beware: many noise gates just attenuate the signal, that may or may not be the same as zeroing it (depending on the amount of attenuation and the level of the typing signal).

Obviously this has bigger implications than passwords, but the password discussion in the article made me realize I’ve never typed most of my passwords. I didn’t consider that as a benefit of password managers, but I’ll take it.

Can this tech be used for making powerless keyboards? As in no power just a mic.

now i'm imagining a keyboard where each key just smacks a piezo crystal

Before I owned a house I had a little Phillips puck-thing with four piezo buttons that you could bind to different smart light presets, no battery or wiring required.

Ah, you've reminded me that there was an early zenith tv remote that was literally just chimes

https://www.theverge.com/23810061/zenith-space-command-remot...

This is a cool idea. Maybe you could make a keyboard specifically designed for this which made distinctive tones for each key like a xylophone. That would be a fun project.

The processing required to process the signal, combined with the decreased precision wouldn't make it very practical, in my opinion.

Good luck with me, I use 34 keys in a Colemak layout with 8 levels of layers, essentially rendering it all useless, many strokes are rolled into the next, and chorded combos will sound like one ambiguous click.

You were safe until you shared that with us, now they can just include your keyboard setup as an input embedding if they target you.

I'm almost as cryptic, I use a en-US apple keyboard on a pc with a fr-CA locale.

Was this with noise filtering off? M series macs have OS level noise filtering and I believe Zoom has a built-in noise filter as well.

I guess I'm safe because I type at 100+ wpm.

that is what Facebook and google are doing for long then?

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