SillyDog701

[Antony]

A Swiss company called Dreamlab Technologies has published a white paper (PDF) describing in general terms how it was able to intercept the stream of keystrokes transmitted by two models of Microsoft 27MHz wireless keyboards.

They tested with two models: Microsoft's Wireless Optical Desktop 1000 &
Wireless Optical Desktop 2000. They believe more Microsoft wireless keyboards are also affected.

It seems that the encryption applied to the data transmitted by the keyboard is so minimal that it hardly deserves the term. Each keystroke is XORed with a random byte generated when the keyboard and receiver are associated.

For more detail, please refer to [url=http://www.dreamlab.net/download/articles/27_Mhz_keyboard_insecurities.pdf]27Mhz Wireless Keyboard Analysis Report aka “We know what you typed last summerâ€

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

[Don_HH2K]

Each keystroke is XORed with a random byte generated when the keyboard and receiver are associated.

I had been reading earlier that Microsoft had been using XOR along with 8-bit key pairs. At that rate, give any decent machine two or three minutes and it could have plowed through <sarcasm>all 256 key pairs</sarcasm>!

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.9b1) Gecko/2007110904 Firefox/3.0b1