I aways wondered if the communication channel between my wireless keyboard and the usb receiver-antena is secure. I never bother to reseach this. Today I figured out the practical way. I turned on my pc at work and I tried to type the first letter of my password. Nothing hapened. Then I started spamming that letter. Still nothing, until the person next to me said “my keyboard is typing all by itself”. It turns out she has a wireless mouse with a seemigly identical receiver-antena usb.

The moral of the story. If it was so easy to almost leak my password unintentionally due to this flaw of wireless keyboard communication, imagine wad a bad actor can do intentionally. Why try to brute force, social engineer e.t.c. when your password can be stollen in transit from your keyboard to your pc.

  • “Encryption” most importantly, preferably encryption checked out by third parties. It’s no guarantee, but firmware updates for peripherals such as keyboards and receivers are usually a good sign; most hardware can use a firmware update down the line, but only the shitty brands don’t make any updates after release. The lists I linked also show how companies responded to flaws in their wireless communications: no response is a bad sign, if there is a response that’s usually a good sign (but may come with instructions like “customer should buy a new, up to date receiver”).

    Wired keyboards are also fine, of course, if you don’t want to deal with security risks.

    If you do want to go wireless, I would personally look at Logitech’s offerings, in my experience their hardware is usually quite good and they do eventually patch their bugs (unlike, say Microsoft).

    • black_mouflon@beehaw.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      I’ll probably going to update to wired. It has all of the advanteges except portability. The only reason I got that wireless keyboard was that I needed something small, chaeap and portable.