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  4. Compromising Electromagnetic Emanations of Wired and Wireless Keyboards
 
conference paper

Compromising Electromagnetic Emanations of Wired and Wireless Keyboards

Vuagnoux, Martin  
•
Pasini, Sylvain  
2009
Proceedings of the 18th USENIX Security Symposium
18th USENIX Security Symposium (Usenix Security '09)

Computer keyboards are often used to transmit confidential data such as passwords. Since they contain electronic components, keyboards eventually emit electromagnetic waves. These emanations could reveal sensitive information such as keystrokes. The technique generally used to detect compromising emanations is based on a wide-band receiver, tuned on a specific frequency. However, this method may not be optimal since a significant amount of information is lost during the signal acquisition. Our approach is to acquire the raw signal directly from the antenna and to process the entire captured electromagnetic spectrum. Thanks to this method, we detected four different kinds of compromising electromagnetic emanations generated by wired and wireless keyboards. These emissions lead to a full or a partial recovery of the keystrokes. We implemented these side-channel attacks and our best practical attack fully recovered 95% of the keystrokes of a PS/2 keyboard at a distance up to 20 meters, even through walls. We tested 12 different keyboard models bought between 2001 and 2008 (PS/2, USB, wireless and laptop). They are all vulnerable to at least one of the four attacks. We conclude that most of modern computer keyboards generate compromising emanations (mainly because of the manufacturer cost pressures in the design). Hence, they are not safe to transmit confidential information.

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Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Vuagnoux, Martin  
Pasini, Sylvain  
Date Issued

2009

Publisher

USENIX Association

Publisher place

Montreal, Canada

Published in
Proceedings of the 18th USENIX Security Symposium
Start page

1

End page

16

Subjects

tempest

•

keyboard

•

compromising emanations

•

side-channel attack

Note

This paper received the Outstanding Student Paper Award

URL

URL

http://www.usenix.org/events/sec09/
Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LASEC  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
18th USENIX Security Symposium (Usenix Security '09)

Montreal, Canada

August 10-14, 2009

Available on Infoscience
August 18, 2009
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/42095
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