I don't think it's very hard for people to put this together, but I don't want to make it easy for people, either.
It's a form of acoustical spying that should raise red flags among computer security and privacy experts. If we were able to figure this out, it's likely that people with less honorable intentions can — or have — as well.
I think the music industry will have a strong challenge working in these kinds of environments.
There are different forms of authentication that could be used, including smart cards, one-time password tokens or biometrics. That helps with passwords, but it doesn't help protect text documents we would want to keep classified. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's important that we're aware of this vulnerability.
Background noise definitely made it harder to recover accurate text, but the differences became smaller after several rounds of feedback. Given enough tries, the computer algorithm will eventually come up with a pretty good estimate of the text that was typed.
We probably don't want to be relying on passwords as we do.
The message from this study is that there is no easy escape from this acoustic snooping. The type of keyboard you use doesn't matter, your typing proficiency doesn't matter, and the background noise can be overcome.
The keyboard is a little like a conga drum.
The message from this study is that there is no easy escape from this acoustic snooping.
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