Don't Skype & Type! Acoustic Eavesdropping in Voice-Over-IP
Alberto Compagno, Mauro Conti, Daniele Lain, Gene Tsudik

TL;DR
This paper introduces a novel acoustic eavesdropping attack called Skype & Type that exploits VoIP calls to reconstruct keystrokes, revealing sensitive information without requiring close physical proximity or extensive prior profiling.
Contribution
It demonstrates that VoIP calls can be exploited for keystroke inference, bypassing strong adversary assumptions of previous acoustic side-channel attacks.
Findings
Achieves 91.7% top-5 accuracy in guessing keystrokes
Robust against bandwidth fluctuations and voice-over-keystrokes
Applicable to multiple VoIP platforms like Skype and Google Hangouts
Abstract
Acoustic emanations of computer keyboards represent a serious privacy issue. As demonstrated in prior work, physical properties of keystroke sounds might reveal what a user is typing. However, previous attacks assumed relatively strong adversary models that are not very practical in many real-world settings. Such strong models assume: (i) adversary's physical proximity to the victim, (ii) precise profiling of the victim's typing style and keyboard, and/or (iii) significant amount of victim's typed information (and its corresponding sounds) available to the adversary. This paper presents and explores a new keyboard acoustic eavesdropping attack that involves Voice-over-IP (VoIP), called Skype & Type (S&T), while avoiding prior strong adversary assumptions. This work is motivated by the simple observation that people often engage in secondary activities (including typing) while…
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Taxonomy
TopicsUser Authentication and Security Systems · Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
