[110632] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Intercepting Microsoft wireless keyboard communications
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James A. Donald)
Thu Dec 13 13:50:16 2007
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:02:31 +1000
From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>
To: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
CC: "Ian Farquhar (ifarquha)" <ifarquha@cisco.com>,
"Leichter, Jerry" <leichter_jerrold@emc.com>,
cryptography@metzdowd.com
In-Reply-To: <20071211040314.0c611b37@berkshire.machshav.com>
Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> Believe it or not, I thought of CFB...
>
> Sending keep-alives will do nasties to battery
> lifetime, I suspect; most of the time, you're not
> typing. As for CFB -- with a 64-bit block cipher (you
> want them to use DES? they're not going to think of
> anything different), it will take 9 keypresses to
> flush the buffer. With AES (apparently your
> assumption), it will take 17 keypresses. This isn't
> exactly muggle-friendly. Just think of the text in
> the instructions... Redundancy? I wonder how much is
> needed to avoid problems. It has to be a divisor of
> the cipher block size, which more or less means 8
> extra bits. How much will that cost in battery life?
Keypress signals, or change of keyboard state signals,
do not need to be a divisor of the cipher block size.
At every block boundary, keyboard transmits a special
signal in the clear that signifies block boundary. Any
time that no key has been pressed for a while, then when
a key is finally pressed, keyboard transmits a bunch of
no-ops sufficient to ensure that the recipient has
recently received an entire block, followed by a
complete description of current keyboard state, so that
recipient knows what change of keyboard state signals
are changes from. Conversely, when the receiver has not
received any signal for a while, it expects such a
signal, and distrusts anything else. Muggle
unfriendliness only occurs if user is typing through a
boot up, which is unlikely to terribly surprise the
user, who is probably banging away at the same keys over
and over again waiting for a reaction, or if the user
wanders out of range while typing, then wanders back in
range again while still typing, in which case again the
user is unlikely to be very surprised.
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