All Your Keystrokes Are Belong To Us

I stumbled upon this paper while doing my weekly browse through articles on CleverCS. To quote from the abstract:

… a novel attack taking as input a 10-minute sound recordingof a user typing English text using a keyboard, and then recovering up to 96% of typed characters…

They even run the recovered text through a spell-checker which successfully corrected a mistake in the text as it was originally typed lol.

Pretty cool idea although I figure if you can sneak a microphone into a building – say by sending someone a bunch of flowers or a promotional desk-lamp, etc. – you can probably just as easily “upgrade” someone’s “faulty” keyboard and record keystrokes that way instead.