From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751466AbZHSJUF (ORCPT ); Wed, 19 Aug 2009 05:20:05 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751257AbZHSJUE (ORCPT ); Wed, 19 Aug 2009 05:20:04 -0400 Received: from tim.des.no ([194.63.250.121]:61564 "EHLO tim.des.no" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750969AbZHSJUD convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Wed, 19 Aug 2009 05:20:03 -0400 X-Greylist: delayed 514 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at vger.kernel.org; Wed, 19 Aug 2009 05:20:03 EDT From: =?utf-8?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=C3=B8rgrav?= To: David Wagner Cc: rwatson@FreeBSD.org (Robert Watson), freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Oliver Pinter Subject: Re: Security: information leaks in /proc enable keystroke recovery References: <200908162109.n7GL9JNK029605@taverner.cs.berkeley.edu> Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:57:44 +0200 In-Reply-To: <200908162109.n7GL9JNK029605@taverner.cs.berkeley.edu> (David Wagner's message of "Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:09:19 -0700 (PDT)") Message-ID: <861vn85zvr.fsf@ds4.des.no> User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.0.92 (berkeley-unix) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org David Wagner writes: > I agree we certainly shouldn't discuss the keystroke recovery attack > as hypothetical, because it is clearly not hypothetical: the authors > implemented it and found that it works. It *is* hypothetical. They were able to collect some keystrokes (but not all) in Linux, but IIUC, all they could do in FreeBSD was figure out whether or not a key was pressed at a certain time (or during a certain interval). They *hypothesize* that the interval between keystrokes can be used to identify the keys being pressed, but they haven't actually done it. I can imagine - purely hypothetically - that it would be possible, but only while the user was typing running text; the parameters would vary greatly from typist to typist, and between keyboard layouts, and you could probably defeat it pretty easily (at least some of the time) by deliberately typing slowly and arythmically, e.g. typing in your password with only one finger. DES -- Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des@des.no