What is on Your Mind?

Are we safe using the everyday wired keyboard? Although this concept is old, I had never seen an actual implementation on the matter until a few days ago. (Four ways of sniffing the electromagnetic emanations of wired keyboards currently on the market in up to 20 meters.)

Check the videos at: http:// lasecwww dot epfl dot ch/keyboard (avoiding referrers)

Any comments?

That's pretty cool
I've heard of (but missed the demo for) the attack that picks up on power fluctuations to a monitor to display what they see on the screen (I forget the name of it now) but havn't seen it done with the data cable on a keyboard.

Their setup looks hard to apply in the wild but I wonder how far this could be taken if one used a high gain directional antenna...

I think the wired keyboard is safe. It's certainly possible to pick up the emanations from any cable, but that doesn't make it easy, the same way you can't get monitor-sniffing devices off the shelf even though the tech's ten years old. It's something for the government to worry about, sure, but I think TEMPEST's already got that covered. Older keyboards often have shielded cables, too. With a high-gain antenna, I imagine you'd start either hitting walls or finding more than one keyboard...