As the use of artificial intelligence has increased, it has not only found new ways to carry out tasks faster and more accurately but also has put forward the troubles about the misuse of technology. However, a study has revealed the dangers of artificial intelligence, saying that an AI tool can listen to keystrokes recorded during a conference call. It will also enable hackers to steal your password.
According to the study, researchers from the Durham, Surrey, and Royal Holloway universities trained an AI model to recognize the keystroke sound generated while typing on the 2021 version of Apple’s MacBook Pro.
Moreover, the research was published in the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops.
However, according to the researchers, when the keystrokes were recorded by a nearby phone, the AI model attained an accuracy of 95%, the “highest accuracy seen without the use of a language model.” Besides, when the keystrokes were recorded by a video conferencing call on the Zoom platform, the accuracy turned out to be 93%, which was,
” a new best for the medium.”
Hence to prepare the AI model, the team pressed each of the 36 keys of the MacBook, including all the letters and numbers. All the keys were pressed 25 times in a row using different pressure and different fingers.
Further researchers stated that Internet users are unaware of the risk that they might be disclosed to a cyber attack called as
“acoustic side-channel attack,” where their passwords can be stolen by an AI tool.
The study also stated that “the omnipresence of the keyboard acoustic emanations makes them a readily available attack vector and prompts victims to underestimate their output. For instance, when typing a password, people will regularly hide their screen but will do little to obscure their keyboard’s sound”.
The researchers also highlighted that passwords containing “full words may be at incredible risk of attack.”
Moreover, Professor Feng Hao from the University of Warwick, who was not part of the study, advised against typing sensitive messages and passwords on a keyboard during a Zoom call.
According to the Guardian, he said, “Besides the sound, the visual images about the slight movements of the shoulder and wrist can also reveal side-channel information about the Jets being typed on the keyboard even though the keyboard is not available from the camera.”
