Wireless keyboards easily cracked
posted Dec 2nd 2007 6:30pm by Eliot Phillipsfiled under: peripherals hacks

We first covered breaking the commodity 27MHz radios used in wireless keyboards, mice, and presenters when [Luis Miras] gave a talk at Black Hat. Since then, the people at Dreamlab have managed to crack the encryption on Microsoft’s Wireless Optical Desktop 1000 and 2000 products (and possibly more). Analyzing the protocol they found out that meta keys like shift and ALT are transmitted in cleartext. The “encryption” used on each regular keystroke involves XORing the key against a random one byte value determined during the initial sync with the receiver. So, if you sniff the handshake, you can decrypt the keystrokes. You really don’t have to though; there are only 256 possible encryption keys. Using a dictionary file you can check all possible keys and determine the correct one after only receiving 20-50 keystrokes. Their demo video shows them sniffing keystrokes from three different keyboards at the same time. Someone could potentially build a wireless keylogger that picks up every keystrokes from every keyboard in an office. You can read more about the attack in the whitepaper(pdf).
[via Midnight Research Labs]

unsurprising, but nice work and cool demo
obviously this could be fixed with better encryption… but in most cases why even bother?? just use a damn wire, its not the end of the world. you have to be close enough to read the screen anyways…
i hate it when “tech journalists” and the like keep preaching about *everything* going wireless–they just don’t get it. wireless is not *better* than wired, it is simply a different method, with its own pros and cons… and shrinking micro-controllers, RF modules, and batteries will not soon make up for the inherent higher security risk, lower availability, and lower bandwidth you get when using wireless over a direct, wired link.
Posted at 7:48 pm on Dec 2nd, 2007 by alex