PSA: Stay away from wireless keyboards (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by black_mouflon@beehaw.org to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I aways wondered if the communication channel between my wireless keyboard and the usb receiver-antena is secure. I never bother to reseach this. Today I figured out the practical way. I turned on my pc at work and I tried to type the first letter of my password. Nothing hapened. Then I started spamming that letter. Still nothing, until the person next to me said "my keyboard is typing all by itself". It turns out she has a wireless mouse with a seemigly identical receiver-antena usb.

The moral of the story. If it was so easy to almost leak my password unintentionally due to this flaw of wireless keyboard communication, imagine wad a bad actor can do intentionally. Why try to brute force, social engineer e.t.c. when your password can be stollen in transit from your keyboard to your pc.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] RovingFox@infosec.pub 7 points 1 year ago

All my passwords are random characters and I just copy/paste out of bitwarden. Can't leak that with a wireless keyboard.

[-] Valmond@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Does that work for logging in?

[-] RovingFox@infosec.pub 1 points 1 year ago

I only log in on my own devices. On devices that I don't own, I change the password afterwards.

[-] pjhenry1216@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

I think they mean logging into the device itself. Like, if you have a computer at work with a work login, etc.

[-] RovingFox@infosec.pub 1 points 1 year ago

Fair enough, that is a bit complicated. Thank you for clarification.

[-] library_napper@monyet.cc 2 points 1 year ago

So what you're saying is that the password to get all your passwords from the cloud is typed onto a wireless keyboard?

this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023

79 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy

32112 readers

444 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS