Vulnerable keyboards from Hewlett-Packard, Anker, Kensington, RadioShack, Insignia, and EagleTec use transceivers from MOSART Semiconductor. The keyboards susceptible to the KeySniffer vulnerabilities use undocumented transceivers, which necessitated the Bastille Research Team reverse engineering the physical layer and radio frequency packet formats before the data could be examined. Documentation about how the transceivers operate, including radio frequency packet formats, enabled them to focus on understanding the data being transmitted between the keyboard and USB dongle. Prior research into wireless keyboard sniffing by Schroeder & Moser, Goodspeed, and Kamkar targeted a line of weakly encrypted Microsoft keyboards that used the well documented nRF24L family of transceivers from Nordic Semiconductor.

Without prior knowledge of the encryption key, an attacker is unable to decrypt the data, and therefore unable to see what is being typed. The dongle knows the encryption key being used by the keyboard, so it is able to decrypt the data and see which key was pressed. In order to prevent eavesdropping, high-end keyboards encrypt the keystroke data before it is transmitted wirelessly to the USB dongle. When a user types on their wireless keyboard, information describing the specific keystrokes is sent wirelessly to the USB dongle.The USB dongle listens for radio frequency packets sent by the keyboard, and notifies the computer whenever the user has pressed, or released, a key.

Wireless keyboards work by transmitting radio frequency packets from the keyboard to a USB dongle plugged into a user’s computer. In contrast to Bluetooth, there is no industry standard to follow, leaving each vendor to implement their own security scheme. Wireless keyboards commonly communicate using proprietary protocols operating in the 2.4GHz ISM band. This means an attacker can see personal and private data such as credit card numbers, usernames, passwords, security question answers and other sensitive or private information all in clear text. The wireless keyboards susceptible to KeySniffer use unencrypted radio communication protocols, enabling an attacker to eavesdrop on all the keystrokes typed by the victim from several hundred feet away using less than $100 of equipment. I000: DetectBegin: e.KeySniffer is a set of security vulnerabilities affecting non-Bluetooth wireless keyboards from eight vendors.

Ism dongle not installed