The Clickety Clack of the Keyboard

...could, conceivably, get you into trouble.

{...}Sounds from typing on computer keyboards are distinctive enough to be decoded, allowing security breaches caused by "acoustic snooping," University of California, Berkeley researchers said on Wednesday.

The researchers said they were able to feed sound recordings of typing on keyboards into a computer and use an algorithm to recover up to 96 percent of the keyboard characters entered by typists.

"It's a form of acoustical spying that should raise red flags among computer security and privacy experts," said Doug Tygar, a Berkeley professor of computer science and information management.

"If we were able to figure this out, it's likely that people with less honorable intentions can -- or have -- as well," Tygar said.{...}

96% of recovered keystrokes isn't all that impressive, however, when you take into account the odds of recovering the missing four percent. After all, you need a password in its entirety---96% of it isn't going to magically open anything. While I will admit it's easier for a hacker to brute force the remaining keystrokes, you'd still have to know precisely what you were doing to get anything.

No, I'm not worried about this. I think this is a much more dazzling weakness as far as computer security is concerned.

{HT: Jonathan}