The study suggests that artificial intelligence can crack passwords by listening to the keyboard sound; to understand

A study published earlier this month suggests that people should have a new interest in artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Scholars found: Artificial intelligence can discover passwords typed with the voice of the keyboard.

The tool detected 95 percent of what was written in the recordings made with smartphones, and 93 percent of the records made with the Zoom video conferencing application.

The research was led by computer scientists from Durham University, the University of Surrey and the Royal Holloway University of London. They trained a deep learning model to see if it would learn to distinguish keyboard sounds, and it did.

The researchers explained that they pressed each key of a button. macbook pro 25 times in a row. Voices were recorded over Zoom and mobile video calls by using multiple fingers and pressing with different forces and ways.

In education, AI model learned to specifically distinguish each key and associate an acoustic signal with each.

Joshua Harrison, Ehsan Toreini, and Maryam Mehrnezhad were the researchers who led the study, which was presented at the European Security and Privacy Symposium 2023.

concerns

The survey did not reveal a complete novelty. The concept of Acoustic Side Channel Attack (ASCA) – or Acoustic Side Channel Attack in Portuguese – has been known for some time; It is a method that uses the sounds emitted by electronic devices to carry out cyber attacks.

This time, the issue highlighted by academics was the role of artificial intelligence in password finding studies. Experts point out that mainly due to the popularization of generative language models: Be careful in public places.

Harrison, Toreini and Mehrnezhad point out that the discovery is at least a warning to people to reduce the risks. In the most serious case,Users can avoid typing passwords on video calls or in public places.

In a less extreme way, it is possible to use layers of security (like two-step verification) or even opt for the use of biometric passwords (like passkeys).