Security News > 2023 > August > New 'Deep Learning Attack' Deciphers Laptop Keystrokes with 95% Accuracy

A group of academics has devised a "Deep learning-based acoustic side-channel attack" that can be used to classify laptop keystrokes that are recorded using a nearby phone with 95% accuracy.

"When trained on keystrokes recorded using the video conferencing software Zoom, an accuracy of 93% was achieved, a new best for the medium," researchers Joshua Harrison, Ehsan Toreini, and Maryam Mehrnezhad said in a new study published last week.

"The ubiquity of keyboard acoustic emanations makes them not only a readily available attack vector, but also prompts victims to underestimate their output," the researcher said.

To pull off the attack, the researchers first carried out experiments in which 36 of the Apple MacBook Pro's keys were used, with each key being pressed 25 times in a row, varying in pressure and finger.

The next phase entailed isolating the individual keystrokes and converting them into a mel-spectrogram, on which a deep learning model called CoAtNet was run to classify the keystroke images.

As countermeasures, the researchers recommend typing style changes, using randomized passwords as opposed to passwords containing full words, and adding randomly generated fake keystrokes for voice call-based attacks.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2023/08/new-deep-learning-attack-deciphers.html