KeyKatcher ~ NanoThoughts 1.0

Friday, February 04, 2005

KeyKatcher

Matt over at PolySciFi posted about keykatchers: keykatcher on PolySciFi Blog
Jp makes the good point that the software ones can also track mouse movements and clicks, but those require admin rights to install. This is way easier to just put on the keyboard cord. It's too bad these things will be tiny as shit in about 3 years. Please be aware people!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

For Windows, the concept of Admin rights only exists on NT-derived (like 2000 and XP) systems, and even on those the list of vulnerabilities that can get you such rights is, I think, fairly extensive.

As for Keycatcher getting smaller, from the picture, it looks like the primary constraint on its current size is the connectors. As long as it has to accept the keyboard plug, and fit into the socket on the PC, it won't get much smaller.

J.p.

Rog said...

Yeah, but 99% of WIndows users don't even understand what Admin rights are. This device allows people that can plug in a connector the ability to keylog. And also keylog people that do secure their systems. Also, they can keylog non-Windows based systems as well.

I think it can get smaller. It has to be the same radius, i.e. circular size, as the the connector, but what's preventing length contraction? It could be a cylinder half a centimeter in height or so. That'd be almost barely noticeable.

Anonymous said...

The length of the pins. If you pull out your keyboard connector, you'll see that there's about a centimeter of it that slides into the PC. That means a minimum of 2x that in length.

A scheme for foiling this if you want to, say, check your e-mail from a library over webmail:
open notepad and, while typing your username and password, randomly switch back and forth, entering garbage text into notepad. That way, they won't be able to know which characters are part of your password, and which are garbage.

J.p.

Rog said...

Yeah, I agree about the connectors, but the ones they are selling have the big ol' flash storage which i think takes up most of the space.

Also, the two window idea is great. you can also do that when composing your email or whatever. (Of course, this only applies if the keyboard connector is not visible, otherwise, the user could just remove it.)