A new study suggests that typing on your keyboard while participating in a Skype call could make you vulnerable to electronic eavesdropping and therefore compromise your privacy.
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and in Italy explain that keystroke sounds can be recorded during a Skype video or voice call, and later analyzed and reassembled as text. “We have shown that during a Skype video or audio conference, your keystrokes are subject to recording and analysis by your call partners. They can learn exactly what you type, including confidential information such as passwords and other very personal stuff,” says co-author of the study, Gene Tsudik.
Various brands of keyboards, from Apple to Logitech, emit specific and distinct sounds. The researchers explain that for example, the T on a MacBook Pro emits a different sound from the same letter on another manufacturer’s product. This, along with some knowledge of a user’s typing style, can be enough for an attacker to re-create whole conversations in the form of text.
The study showed that if a spy has some knowledge of the typist’s style and their keyboard, they have an alarming 91.7% rate of accuracy in guessing a key pressed by the victim. Even more disturbingly, when a spy doesn’t have such information, they still have a 41.89% chance of identifying which keys are being struck.
Luckily, these attacks are not possible with touch-screen or holographic keyboards and keypads. The study does, however, show how dangerous traditional physical keyboards can be.
Source:
University of California, Irvine(https://news.uci.edu/research/typing-while-skyping-could-compromise-privacy/)
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