Apple keyboards are vulnerable to hackers

dogmaryxx

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Apple-Keyboard-Hack-Proved-Possible-118209.shtml

Strider590

knowledgepower1

Apple users wont like this you know? The machine is invincible!

Marty_J

This can't be; I'm always being told Macs have such a low market share, no one would waste any time trying to look for security problems in them.

isofa

Well if you want to get technical, using very sensitive equipment, potentially an expert record any keystrokes by measuring the energy and frequency from any keyboard, including a wired one, from the minute differences between keypresses.

Far more at risk is someone with a PC, Mac or any other type of wireless keyboard transmitting over blue-tooth, someone could be sitting outside your house recording every password.

I'm off to hide in the garage...

kwikbreaks

Bluetooth connections are encrypted.

isofa

kwikbreaks wrote: »

Bluetooth connections are encrypted.

And that'll stop a professional hacker, who can get close enough to your transmissions?

A engineer with a very sensitive scanner can pickup the emissions from a corded keyboard, showing after a while what keys are being pressed, with no direct connection to the keyboard itself. Wireless is a walk in the park for anyone with detailed knowledge.

WPA has even been broken a few months ago, and we all know how terribly weak WEP is.

Nothing is hack proof. Nothing. Things are temporarily secure, but everything has a weakness and will invariable be broken at some stage, especially as computing power increases.

kwikbreaks

Of course the encryption could be broken but the fact remains that it is easier to hack wired keyboards than bluetooth ones so "Far more at risk is someone with a PC, Mac or any other type of wireless keyboard transmitting over blue-tooth" is incorrect.

thescouselander

Thats all very well but how would this hack be used in a practical sense. Presumably you would have to have physical access to the keyboard to install the key logger and then you would need access to the keyboard again to retrieve the key log. Not a worry for the average personal user.

kwikbreaks

It's all scaremongering as usual but the radiation could (in theory) be picked up from a short distance away so there is no need for physical access.

Far more risky is using public WiFi hotspots.

Marty_J

thescouselander wrote: »

Thats all very well but how would this hack be used in a practical sense. Presumably you would have to have physical access to the keyboard to install the key logger and then you would need access to the keyboard again to retrieve the key log. Not a worry for the average personal user.

The user would have to download a keyboard firmware update (from someone who isn't Apple). The malware would then live in the keyboard's memory.

The last line of the report is quite telling: "many other devices have firmware update mechanisms that we believe can also be exploited by attackers for malicious purposes".

This seems to be a problem shared by many devices with firmware that can be updated, and it's not confined to Apple keyboards.

Presumably they choose an Apple keyboard because then it'll hit the headlines. An article called "Microsoft security problem found" wouldn't really be news.