Comment on Boffins convert typing sounds into text with 95% accuracy

laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I think it’s largely been a state actor thing. Directional microphone to record your window from across the street, spend significant tax money on crunching numbers on a supercomputer to get at your password kind of thing, I think they already could do it in the 90s. Real-time 95% accuracy on a non-specialised device is a quite different ballpark: Now every skiddie can do it.

  source

  • skulblaka@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Now every skiddie can do it.

    And this is the real, serious problem. Most people are pretty unlikely to stop a state sponsored spy operation no matter how careful they are. It's barely worth worrying about unless you know for a fact you're being tapped and that you will be killed about it, and even if you do know this the state can pull some space age bullshit out of their asses that doesn't yet have a counter. Top secret military industrial research goes into maintaining that exact advantage every year, if they really want to get you, you will get got. But if Joey Dickbeater and his school friends can just point a mic at your window and then upload it to the Pass-o-Gram to decode it, you have a real problem. It's like when TikTok kids figured out they can steal Kias with usb keys - if every teenager in America knows how to steal your car, its lifetime is going to be measured in minutes. Same with passwords.

    Sounds like it's time to buy a bunch of random cherry switches and randomize them across my keyboard.....

    source

    • Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What it means is that NIST probably needs to update its security recommendations to require hardware keys for even low level systems. It’s going to be a huge pain in the ass though.

      source
    • ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Sounds like it’s time to buy a bunch of random cherry switches and randomize them across my keyboard…

      And rotate them. While I don’t plan to waste my energy, having hot swap sockets and swapping a few around should thwart the attack. You would have to do it frequently enough that relevant training data gets wasted before it’s useful. I’m pretty paranoid, but not that much.

      I’ll just consider it good security hygiene to get a new keyboard often :)

      source

      • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Have you considered only re-doing the tinfoil wrapper every day? It should crackle differently every time.

        source
  • laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Gotcha, that makes more sense

    source
• misophist@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Coding for alternate key mappings is almost as trivial as detecting other languages.

  source

  • laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah, that’s what I figured

    source
  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s more trivial because it’s a 1:1 relationship. A is a, s is o, d is e, and so on. Detecting other languages is harder because there’s more of them and there isn’t a 1:1 conversation to English.

    source
• frezik@midwest.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There has been previous work on this, yes. It required a dictionary of suggested words. That would make it useful for snooping most typing, but not for randomly generated passwords. This new technique doesn’t seem to have that limitation.

  source

  • laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Okay, gotcha. I didn’t look that deeply into it previously so I never realized how limited that was

    source
  • Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    So about those people that run around saying passphrases are better… 😅

    source