Sinister Security: Computers

Hackers Could Steal Personal Info By “Listening” To Your Keyboard, Alarming Study Finds

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As if you needed another cybersecurity issue to worry about, a team of researchers at Southern Methodist University have discovered that it is quite possible for hackers to use your smartphone’s sensor to intercept the sound of your keyboard typing. After picking up these sound waves, a skilled hacker could potentially analyze and decipher which keys were struck and piece together the words being typed.

Even in a loud and crowded room filled with people talking amongst each other and typing, researchers say they were able to capture and decode the majority of what was being typed.

“We were able to pick up what people are typing at a 41 percent word accuracy rate. And we can extend that out – above 41 percent – if we look at, say, the top 10 words of what we think it might be,” explains lead author Eric. C. Larson in a release.

All in all, hackers would only have to gain access to a smartphone’s sensor for mere seconds in order to possibly steal valuable information, according to researchers.

“Based on what we found, I think smartphone makers are going to have to go back to the drawing board and make sure they are enhancing the privacy with which people have access to these sensors in a smartphone,” Larson comments.

For the study, the authors wanted to recreate a real-world office scenario as best they could. In order to accomplish this, they placed numerous people inside a conference room, and asked them to begin collaborating and taking notes on their laptops about a fictional upcoming project. Meanwhile, there were eight smartphones placed on the conference room table, all of which were anywhere from three inches to several feet away from the nearest keyboard.

Participants weren’t given any specific instructions or a script on how to interact with each other. Additionally, they were free to type down notes in whichever way they saw fit.

Researchers say one of the main factors that motivated them to perform this study is the fact that smartphones are pretty much always “on” all day and night. In this sense, these devices represent a constant open window for malicious hackers to peak through.

All modern smartphones contain various sensors intended to help the device “know” what is happening around it. For example, some sensors help smartphones determine if they are placed on a table or moving around in someone’s pocket. Certain sensors are only turned on during certain activities or when given permission, but others are always on.

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“We used sensors that are always turned on, so all we had to do was develop a new app that processed the sensor output to predict the key that was pressed by a typist,” Larson says.

However, any would-be hacker looking to snoop on someone else’s keyboard typing would have to know the type of table the compromised smartphone is sitting on. For instance, the keyboard sounds made on a wooden table differ from those produced on a metal table.

All that being said, the authors believe they have discovered a very real, and plausible new way hackers may be stealing information. Even more unsettling, Larson and his team say that there really is no way to definitively know if you’re being hacked this way.

The study is published in the scientific journal Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.

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Originally from New York, John has been writing professionally for over 7 years.

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This article was sourced from StudyFinds.org

Image credit: Pixabay

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Light Has Been Stored as Sound For The First Time

By 0x000216

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For the first time ever, scientists have stored light-based information as sound waves on a computer chip - something the researchers compare to capturing lightning as thunder. While that might sound a little strange, this conversion is critical if we ever want to shift from our current, inefficient electronic computers, to light-based computers that move data at the speed of light.

Light-based or photonic computers have the potential to run at least 20 times faster than your laptop, not to mention the fact that they won't produce heat or suck up energy like existing devices.

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This is because they, in theory, would process data in the form of photons instead of electrons. We say in theory, because, despite companies such as IBM and Intel pursuing light-based computing, the transition is easier said than done. Coding information into photons is easy enough - we already do that when we send information via optical fibre.

But finding a way for a computer chip to be able to retrieve and process information stored in photons is tough for the one thing that makes light so appealing: it's too damn fast for existing microchips to read. This is why light-based information that flies across internet cables is currently converted into slow electrons. But a better alternative would be to slow down the light and convert it into sound and that's exactly what researchers from the University of Sydney in Australia have now done.

“The information in our chip in acoustic form travels at a velocity five orders of magnitude slower than in the optical domain,” said project supervisor Birgit Stiller. “It is like the difference between thunder and lightning.”

This means that computers could have the benefits of data delivered by light - high speeds, no heat caused by electronic resistance, and no interference from electromagnetic radiation - but would also be able to slow that data down enough so that computers chips could do something useful with it.

“For [light-based computers] to become a commercial reality, photonic data on the chip needs to be slowed down so that they can be processed, routed, stored and accessed,” said one of the research team, Moritz Merklein.

“This is an important step forward in the field of optical information processing as this concept fulfils all requirements for current and future generation optical communication systems,” added team member Benjamin Eggleton.

The team did this by developing a memory system that accurately transfers between light and sound waves on a photonic microchip - the kind of chip that will be used in light-based computers.

You can see how it works in the animation below:

First, photonic information enters the chip as a pulse of light (yellow), where it interacts with a 'write' pulse (blue), producing an acoustic wave that stores the data. Another pulse of light, called the 'read' pulse (blue), then accesses this sound data and transmits as light once more (yellow).

While unimpeded light will pass through the chip in 2 to 3 nanoseconds, once stored as a sound wave, information can remain on the chip for up to 10 nanoseconds, long enough for it to be retrieved and processed. The fact that the team were able to convert the light into sound waves not only slowed it down, but also made data retrieval more accurate and, unlike previous attempts, the system worked across a broad bandwidth.

“Building an acoustic buffer inside a chip improves our ability to control information by several orders of magnitude,” said Merklein.

“Our system is not limited to a narrow bandwidth. So unlike previous systems this allows us to store and retrieve information at multiple wavelengths simultaneously, vastly increasing the efficiency of the device.” added Stiller.

The research has been published in Nature Communications.

Sinister Security

Hackers Could Steal Personal Info By “Listening” To Your Keyboard, Alarming Study Finds

Avoiding The Eye - Ships Free Today!

Light Has Been Stored as Sound For The First Time

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