Keyboard JitterBug

Gaurav Shah, Andres Molina and Matt Blaze

What is it ?

The Keyboard JitterBug is a hardware bug that sits between the keyboard and the host. It adds small and calculated delays to keypresses, creating a covert network timing channel superimposed over an already established network connection. This timing channel allows the leakage of typed secrets over a network where a passive eavesdropper, having the capability to monitor network timing, can recover these secrets. The technique works for any interactive network application (e.g. SSH, VNC, etc). More details are available in our paper Keyboards and Covert Channels.

Source Code

Source code and PCB templates for the PS/2 version should be available soon. Watch out for this space!

Last updated: Jul 25th, 2006