Acoustic Keyloggers - keyboards are like drums.

Do you still have faith in firewalls? Do you still think passwords will protect you? Not so fast: it is now possible to eavesdrop on a typist's keystrokes and, by exploiting minute variations in the sounds made by different keys, distinguish and decipher what is being typed.

Since keyboards are like drums, every time you pound a key it makes a distinctive sound - it is possible to write a key logger that works on sound; and thats exactly what two researchers at IBM Almaden Labs. did.

Dmitri Asonov, at IBM Almaden Labs in San Jose has shown how to record key strokes acoustically. The principle is simple. Keyboards are a bit like drums: the keys rest atop a plastic plate; different areas of the plate yield different sounds when struck. The human ear can't tell the difference, but if the sounds are recorded and processed by a highly sophisticated computer program, the computer can, with a little bit of practice, learn to translate the sounds of keystrokes into the appropriate letters and symbols.

This means that firewalls and passwords will amount to nothing if someone manages to bug a room and record the sound of keystrokes. Asonov managed to pull off this feat with readily available recording equipment at a short distance. Even as far away as 50 feet, and with significant background noise, he was able to replicate his success using a parabolic microphone. He also anticipated an obvious practical objection: how does a would-be eavesdropper get into a building and spend enough time to ''train'' a computer program to recognize the keystrokes of a particular keyboard? Not a problem: it seems that keyboards of the same make and model sound sufficiently alike -- regardless of who is typing -- that a computer trained on one keyboard can be unleashed on another.

For the full article by STEPHEN MIHM - see Keyboards are like drums