Keystroke Logging Technology Race Rages On

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» 29 May 2009

Keystroke Logging Technology Race Rages On

It's common knowledge nowadays for people to create passwords that are hard to guess via changing them frequently to make sure they stay unknown and combining letters and numbers together for added encryption. That's a great practice to follow, but all of that may be rendered futile if a hacker were to, say, be able to know your keystrokes while you type.

Keystroke logging or the act of secretly and remotely monitoring all the keys struck on somebody else's keyboard has been a staple service for both law enforcement agencies and cyber crime syndicates since it was first invented. It's because any text encoded on a computer via the keyboard—whether it's as short as a password or as a long as a classified government document—can be recorded using this tool.

However, all is not lost for people looking for a bit of security despite the sophisticated little toys hackers have at their disposal. More to the point, security researchers are currently proposing an application that perfectly counters the advantages of keystroke logging.

The technology works by detecting how you type instead of what you type, which should be useful in avoiding unauthorized access to your Internet accounts even if your password has been discovered or compromised. What that means is that even if an intruder types the correct password to your account, they won't be able to access your system until they figure out "how" you'd type your password.

Just as human handwriting is a unique and hard-to-counterfeit way of ensuring your identity on paper, your typing style is also as personal and exceptional as your thumbprint. For example, there are users who hunt and peck letters on the keyboard, while others are typists that can type at a speed of 60-70 words per minute.

Earlier in 2009, some experts from Inverse Path (an information technology consultancy firm based in Italy and the United Kingdom) announced that they could find out which keys were pressed on a keyboard by using a laser on it. Aside from the hassle of needing to be at the direct line of sight of your machine, it's an important development in the industry of cyber security.

At present, the typical approach hackers use in order to start checking your every keystroke is by covertly installing into your system keystroke logging applications that's usually distributed over the Internet through viruses, worms, trojans, and other similar malware.

However, such offhand tactics are easily thwarted by security programs—i.e., anti-virus and anti-malware software as well as firewalls. Moreover, keystroke logging programs are quite detectable because they have a tendency to leave a distinct trail when they transmit the information they have collected over the web.