A team of British researchers have developed an AI that can silently identify your keyboard clicks and predict your password with an accuracy that might scare you – yes, it’s 95%.
What Happened: Concerns of your smartphone or computer eavesdropping on you and stealing your passwords and other data are no longer a conspiracy theory, thanks to this new AI.
Named CoAtNet, the researchers trained the AI on keystroke data to understand the acoustic nature of each stroke. Armed with this data, CoAtNet was then able to predict some of the most private information – passwords – with a strike rate of 95%.
This makes it seem like it is something straight out of a sci-fi thriller or a James Bond movie. The researchers warn that this is just the beginning and with AI getting smarter and faster, it might be able to predict strings of text like passwords and even more information with increasing accuracy, according to Dr. Ehsan Toreini, one of the researchers on the team.
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"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," said the paper, adding that even over a Zoom video call, the AI's accuracy was 93%. If you are on a Zoom call, it might not be the best idea to type out your passwords elsewhere.
"Our results prove the practicality of these side channel attacks via off-the-shelf equipment and algorithms," the paper adds.
Don't Ring The Alarm Bells Yet: However, before you panic, you need to know that CoAtNet needs to be trained thoroughly. The research paper states that the researchers had to click each key 25 times in a row for the AI to recognize the stroke accurately.
It also struggles to decipher how the Shift key is used – which means using a mix of upper and lowercase characters, symbols, and numbers could be a good defense against these threats.
Additionally, using password managers and two-factor authentication keys can be two more ways of keeping your accounts secure.
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