Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Saturday August 01 2015, @02:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the way-I-type-I'm-not-surprised dept.

Security researchers have refined a long-theoretical profiling technique into a highly practical attack that poses a threat to Tor users and anyone else who wants to shield their identity online.

The technique collects user keystrokes as an individual enters usernames, passwords, and other data into a website. After a training session that typically takes less than 10 minutes, the website—or any other site connected to the website—can then determine with a high degree of certainty when the same individual is conducting subsequent online sessions. The profiling works by measuring the minute differences in the way each person presses keys on computer keyboards. Since the pauses between keystrokes and the precise length of time each key is pressed are unique for each person, the profiles act as a sort of digital fingerprint that can betray its owner's identity.

The prospect of widely available databases that identify users based on subtle differences in their typing was unsettling enough to researchers Per Thorsheim and Paul Moore that they have created a Chrome browser plugin that's designed to blunt the threat. The plugin caches the input keystrokes and after a brief delay relays them to the website in at a pseudo-random rate. Thorsheim, a security expert who organizes the annual PasswordsCon conference, and Moore, an information security consultant at UK-based Urity Group, conceived the plugin after thinking through all the ways the typing profiles could be used to compromise online anonymity.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by K_benzoate on Saturday August 01 2015, @03:14AM

    by K_benzoate (5036) on Saturday August 01 2015, @03:14AM (#216626)

    I don't doubt that there's some very weak signal hidden in all that noise, nor do I doubt that it could be extracted under ideal conditions. Many techniques which work in a laboratory setting (or equivalent) aren't useful "in the field". And this could be thwarted by typing a message into a text editor first, and then copypasting the entire thing at once and submitting it. Also, I'm not sure how you're going to get your timing measurement code to work without any form of script running in the webpage--disabling scripting is SOP for using Tor.

    Prose analyses is probably a better bet if you're hot to deanonymize people in this style. Anyone who has read a lot of work from one author knows that there are certain words, phrases, and sentence structures which come up over and over again. Some authors are more susceptible than others (I'm looking at you, Neal Stephenson) but everyone does it to some extent. We all have a unique subset vocabulary out of the space of possible words in our language.

    --
    Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2015, @04:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2015, @04:20AM (#216639)

    Prose analyses is probably a better bet if you're hot to deanonymize people in this style. Anyone who has read a lot of work from one author knows that there are certain words, phrases, and sentence structures which come up over and over again. Some authors are more susceptible than others (I'm looking at you, Neal Stephenson) but everyone does it to some extent. We all have a unique subset vocabulary out of the space of possible words in our language.

    Not every message will reflect that, especially simple ones. And people often copy phrases and text from others. Furthermore, it would be easy enough to fix this and perhaps randomize your messages in certain ways to fool it.

    • (Score: 2) by K_benzoate on Saturday August 01 2015, @04:40AM

      by K_benzoate (5036) on Saturday August 01 2015, @04:40AM (#216645)

      Vulnerability to prose analyses increases as the corpus of text increases in size. So if there's an anonymous account that's been posting ISIS propaganda, for example, and you've got several thousand words you can then try to match that up with public profiles and see if there are any people with that writing style. It's more beneficial if you already have narrowed down a list of suspects. It's also useful to determine if more than one person is contributing under the same anonymous profile.

      --
      Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2015, @03:22PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2015, @03:22PM (#216769)

        Vulnerability to prose analyses increases as the corpus of text increases in size.

        Again, trivially bypassed.

        Many things affect people's minds. Are they drunk? Are they tired? Are they angry? Are they sad? Any number of things could reduce the effectiveness of "prose analysis". How much scientific consensus is there that prose analysis is even effective?

      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday August 01 2015, @05:58PM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday August 01 2015, @05:58PM (#216799) Journal

        You have made some really good points, but I would say that prose style is easily copied. It's like actors who do impressions of famous people. When they're good at it you know exactly who they're aping. Same thing for prose. I've heard David Sedaris do it well, and others too.

        It's not likely that somebody would bother learning your style unless you were famous, but if someone, an agency, wanted to frame you it wouldn't be all that hard.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 01 2015, @07:00AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Saturday August 01 2015, @07:00AM (#216679) Homepage Journal

    My father - who had a Top Secret clearance - once told me that the Soviets knew how to transcribe your text if you typed it with an IBM Selectric. He was permitted to use them but only in a windowless, soundproof room.

    He preferred to write by hand with a pen then get his secretary to type it up.

    The delay between the keypress and the type ball striking the paper is distinctly different for each character.

    If the Soviets could do that by bouncing a low-intensity infrared laser off his office window so as to "hear" his typing by the vibrations of the glass, I figure I myself could write the code described in this article in about a day.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]