UCSB Security Group: Spying on Typing

UCSB Security Group’s research on spying on typing featured in
Scientific American

The research of a team led by Professor Giovanni Vigna and composed
of Marco Cova (PhD student) and Davide Balzarotti (Post-Doc at the
time, and now Professor at Eurecom) was featured in the May 2009
Edition of Scientific American. The research mentioned is described
in the paper “ClearShot: Eavesdropping on Keyboard Input from Video”,
which was published in the Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on
Security and Privacy Oakland, in 2008.

The research was mentioned in the article How To Steal Secrets
without a Network, which describes subtle ways to eavesdrop
on users’ computers using reflections, sounds, and video. The
UCSB researchers have developed a novel technique that can identify
the movement of a person’s hands on the keyboard and automatically
reconstruct what is being typed. The technique uses a composition
of video processing techniques, motion identification, and statistical
analysis to recover the typed text.