Are you one kind who hates tangling wires and you want everything to be wireless? You’d have recently equipped yourself with a wireless keyboard that would probably add little neatness to your work desk. But be extra careful, when you’re shopping online using this wireless keyboard to punch in your credit card information on an online store or typing any confidential information using it, as the information transmitted wirelessly over its receiver based could be easily eavesdropped. It’s simply because of the encryption used by the wireless keyboard to safe guard data transmission to its receiver is easily breakable. And the researchers at Dreamlab Technologies AG and Remote-exploit.org have proved that!
The researchers had carried out experiment on couple of wireless keyboards including Microsoft’s Wireless Optical Desktop 1000 and Wireless Optical Desktop 2000. And their result has shown that the encryption used in the wireless keyboards in their experiment encrypts only the actual keystroke, but the metaflag (use of Alt, Shift, or Ctrl) and identifier bits are sent in the clear. Key stroke’s encrypted in a one-byte USB Hid code using a simple XOR mechanism and a single byte of random data generated when the keyboard synchronizes with the receiver. And there will be no encryption keys refreshed at any time interval.
As there are only 256 possible key values, intercepted keystrokes can be translated by brute force without any need to actually break the encryption key; the research team was able to decrypt the transmitted data and recover the encryption key within only 20-50 keystrokes. The researchers suggest that some Bluetooth keyboards could be more secure, provided the manufacturers stick to the standard’s security system. The paper also tells that Logitech product has additional software encryption layer known as Secure Connect, that would be safer to use. So, it’s better to fall back using wired keyboard instead of wireless, even though you hate the tangling wires.
via [Arstechnica]
November 1st, 2010 at 7:36 am
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