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Apparently, some computer scientists at the University of California Berkeley have found a way to decipher what your password with a computer, simply by hearing it. When they typed a 10 digit password combination, the computer returned 75 different possibilities. What that means, is that they should be able to break 1 out of every 75 people’s passwords on the very first try. I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty frightening. Here are a few articles on the subject.
In addition to having your password heard, I also ran across an article from PCWorld from a couple of years ago that discusses security vulnerabilities using a wireless keyboard. From that March edition in 2003, Andrew Brandt states “Input devices that share a radio frequency can also share keystroke information across surprisingly long distances.” Anyway, who would’ve thought that there were a couple of ways like this to have your password picked up by simply typing.
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3 Responses for "Hearing Passwords"
September 15th, 2005 at 9:08 am
1Last summer at a security conference, somebody published a paper about that, or something similar to it… it uses a neural network to process the soundwaves, but originally they had a big problem with it only working well on the keyboard it was trained on.
September 15th, 2005 at 9:29 am
2we’ve been ‘dug’
September 16th, 2005 at 10:04 am
3I blogged about this yesterday as well, and Doug Tygar was good enough to drop by and leave the URL to his paper that describes their findings/research…
Something to read over the weekend :)
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