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.
Hmm, do you want a keyboard with firmware updates that encrypts keybresses…
Or simply use USB?..
USB works great but you need a lot of extension cables to control your media center PC from the couch, and they’re usually not exactly up to spec either.
I don’t use a wireless keyboard, I do have a wireless mouse for travelling, though. Sometimes wireless makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t.