Sounds of Typing Give Messages Away
The clickety-clack of your keyboard might be enough to spill your secrets. A team of researchers in California has successfully decoded what was typed into a computer from an audio recording.
Doug Tygar of the University of California, Berkeley and his colleagues used a standard microphone to record 10 minutes of noise generated by computer typists. Because the sound generated by each keystroke is slightly different, the researchers were able to generate a computer program to decode what was written. "Using statistical learning theory, the computer can categorize the sound of each key as it's struck and develop a good first guess with an accuracy of 60 percent for characters, and 20 percent for words," explains team member Li Zhuang also of U.C. Berkeley. "We then use spelling and grammar check to refine the result, which increased the accuracy to 70 percent and the word accuracy to 50 percent."
Fortunatly, my typing is so bad and I have to go back and correct so many things that any computer trying to declode what I'm typing would blow up like one of those Star Trek computers that Kirk talks to death (or the computer in The Prisoner episode that Number Six destroys by asking it "Why?"--depending on your choice of cultural reference).
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