There are different forms of authentication that could be used, including smart cards, one-time password tokens or biometrics. That helps with passwords, but it doesn't help protect text documents we would want to keep classified. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's important that we're aware of this vulnerability.

Doug Tygar

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Background noise definitely made it harder to recover accurate text, but the differences became smaller after several rounds of feedback. Given enough tries, the computer algorithm will eventually come up with a pretty good estimate of the text that was typed.

AccurateBackgroundBecame

We probably don't want to be relying on passwords as we do.

The keyboard is a little like a conga drum.

The message from this study is that there is no easy escape from this acoustic snooping. The type of keyboard you use doesn't matter, your typing proficiency doesn't matter, and the background noise can be overcome.

I don't think it's very hard for people to put this together, but I don't want to make it easy for people, either.