Wooden Retro Keyboard Build

November 3, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

[phirzcol] sent us this cool step by step build of a retro looking keyboard, Inspired by [Von Slatt] and his work. [phirzcol] starts with a standard keyboard and removes the keys. He steams some wood to wrap the keyboard, then finishes it off nicely. The process of making the keys looks pretty grueling. Each key has 4 parts which have to be hand cut and assembled. A blue accent light is a nice touch as well. The keyboard looks pretty good, but we’d like to try typing on it for a while to see how usable it is. If it looks like too much effort, you can actually buy it on ebay.

Eavesdrop On Keyboards Wirelessly

October 20, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 71 Comments

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/2007855%5D

Every time you press a key on your keyboard, a small burst of electromagnetic radiation is let out. This radiation can be captured and decoded. Though it only affects some models, this is pretty serious. They tested 11 different keyboards and they were all vulnerable to at least one of the four methods of attack. Tests have shown that the data can be read through walls and up to 65 feet away. That is pretty scary stuff. Someone could be setting up in the apartment or office right next to yours to listen to every keystroke you type. Check out the second video after the break.

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Clove 2 Glove For One Handed Input

July 12, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 23 Comments

[Christopher Mitchell] (previously on Hack a Day) has come up with a rather interesting input device. The Clove 2 glove is a Bluetooth data input interface. The goal is to be able to “type” without the use of a traditional keyboard. Key strokes are achieved through finger movements. Your computer simply sees this as a Bluetooth HID device and some software translates it for you.

While it may seem confusing, he’s designed it to be very similar to typing on a keyboard. Each finger movement or combination is a key stroke. Just like typing on a regular keyboard, there are modifying strokes such as ALT or shift that effect others. Most common used keys require the least combinations of finger movements.

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Monome Keyboard

July 3, 2008 by Juan Aguilar 2 Comments

If you asked [David Phipps] whether he prefers Monomes or traditional keyboards, he might ask you “why not have both?” We don’t presume to speak for him, but that’s what we think he’d say based on his Monome-keyboard combination, which puts a Monome right in the keyboard’s console, giving the user the best of both worlds.

[Phipps] calls his device The Peaceblaster (also the name of his album), and it is constructed from a 5-octave Fatar keybed, MKE electronic components, and a Doepfer PKE for the faders and knobs. Everything is available via USB and MIDI out. The project is as yet unfinished, and he hopes to fit a mac mini into the works. If he succeeds, this will be one of the most elegant, powerful and fun keyboards we’ve seen in quite some time.

Giant Fabric Keyboard

May 28, 2008 by Juan Aguilar 10 Comments

[ladyada] pointed us in the direction of this giant fabric keyboard built by [Maurin Donneaud]. The construction of it looks fairly simple, like the buttons used in [fbz]’s WiFi detecting backpack strap, but on a larger scale. We’ll take you through its construction, pictures and all, after the break.

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Wireless Keyboards Easily Cracked

December 2, 2007 by Eliot 69 Comments

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]

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Black Hat 2007 Other Wireless

August 2, 2007 by Eliot 8 Comments

Luis Miras presented “Other Wireless: New ways of being Pwned”. Instead of common con topics like Bluetooth or WiFi, this dealt with the cheap radios used in wireless keyboards, mice, and things like the wireless remote pictured above. These RX/TX pairs are found in 27MHz, 900MHz, and 2.4GHz versions. The devices all use the same main components: a microcontroller, an EEPROM for storing the serial number, and the transmitter. The dongle is nearly the same only with a receiver.