AI Tool Can Steal Passwords While the User Is On A Zoom Call: Study
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can steal passwords with 95% accuracy by listening to the keystrokes while the user is on a Zoom call, finds study.
The alarming results are revealed in a study named, “A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards”, on 3 August Thursday.
AI tools, which help hackers, will be a serious risk factor in this era of technology boom.
The research was done by a group of UK-based computer scientists including Joshua Harrison, Ehsan Toreini, and Maryam Mehrnezhad. For the procedures, an artificial intelligence model to identify the sounds generated by keystrokes on the 2021 version of a MacBook Pro — described as a “popular off-the-shelf laptop, was designed.
AI has the ability to identify the specific keys being pressed by listening to the typing sounds, said the researchers.
“When trained on keystrokes recorded by a nearby phone, the classifier achieved an accuracy of 95%, the highest accuracy seen without the use of a language model. When trained on keystrokes recorded using the video-conferencing software Zoom, an accuracy of 93% was achieved, a new best for the medium”, said the study.
The hacker-friendly AI tool was extremely accurate while “listening” to typing though the laptop’s microphone during a Zoom video conference.
The researchers called it as an “acoustic side channel attack”.
“Most of the users are unaware of the risk that some red hackers could monitor their typing to breach accounts”, they warned.
“The ubiquity of keyboard acoustic emanations makes them not only a readily available attack vector, but also prompts victims to underestimate (and therefore not try to hide) their output”, they added.
People usually hide their screen while typing their password, but did not care about the sound the keyboard makes. For the research purpose, the scholars have pressed 36 of the laptop’s keys a total of 25 times each in varying pressures.
But the AI was able to listen and identify the keys by the wavelength of the sound it was producing. An iPhone 13 mini, was placed 17 centimeters away from the keyboard.
