No Training Hurdles: Fast Training-Agnostic Attacks to Infer Your Typing

Traditional methods to eavesdrop keystrokes leverage some malware installed in a target computer to record the keystrokes for an adversary. Existing research work has identified a new class of attacks that can eavesdrop the keystrokes in a non-invasive way without infecting the target computer to install a malware. The common idea is that pressing a key of a keyboard can cause a unique and subtle environmental change, which can be captured and analyzed by the eavesdropper to learn the keystrokes. For these attacks, however, a training phase must be accomplished to establish the relationship between an observed environmental change and the action of pressing a specific key. This significantly limits the impact and practicality of these attacks.

In this paper, we discover that it is possible to design keystroke eavesdropping attacks without requiring the training phase. We create this attack based on the channel state information extracted from wireless signal. To eavesdrop keystrokes, we establish a mapping between typing each letter and its respective environmental change by exploiting the correlation among observed changes and known structures of dictionary words. We implement this attack on software-defined radio platforms and conduct a suite of experiments to validate the impact of this attack. We point out that this paper does not propose to use wireless signal for inferring keystrokes, since such work already exists. Instead, the main goal of this paper is to propose new techniques to remove the training process, which can make existing work unpractical.