Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:57:44 +0200 From: =?utf-8?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=C3=B8rgrav?= <des@des.no> To: David Wagner <daw@cs.berkeley.edu> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org, Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Oliver Pinter <oliver.pntr@gmail.com> Subject: Re: Security: information leaks in /proc enable keystroke recovery Message-ID: <861vn85zvr.fsf@ds4.des.no> In-Reply-To: <200908162109.n7GL9JNK029605@taverner.cs.berkeley.edu> (David Wagner's message of "Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:09:19 -0700 (PDT)") References: <200908162109.n7GL9JNK029605@taverner.cs.berkeley.edu>
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David Wagner <daw@cs.berkeley.edu> writes: > I agree we certainly shouldn't discuss the keystroke recovery attack > as hypothetical, because it is clearly not hypothetical: the authors > implemented it and found that it works. It *is* hypothetical. They were able to collect some keystrokes (but not all) in Linux, but IIUC, all they could do in FreeBSD was figure out whether or not a key was pressed at a certain time (or during a certain interval). They *hypothesize* that the interval between keystrokes can be used to identify the keys being pressed, but they haven't actually done it. I can imagine - purely hypothetically - that it would be possible, but only while the user was typing running text; the parameters would vary greatly from typist to typist, and between keyboard layouts, and you could probably defeat it pretty easily (at least some of the time) by deliberately typing slowly and arythmically, e.g. typing in your password with only one finger. DES --=20 Dag-Erling Sm=C3=B8rgrav - des@des.no
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