Keykeriki: The first open source wireless keyboard sniffer!

by Black on June 25, 2009 · 0 comments

in Open Source, Security Reconnaissance, Security tools

We all know about keyloggers and  their various uses. But, then again, these keyloggers have some drawbacks. Firstly, they can be detected very easily depending the method of their programming. Secondly, if a keylogger is programmed using normal hooks, then it will fail with applications like terminal services or windows logon, etc. To overcome this, you need a kernel mode driver, which then needs administrator, unless you find a way to install a driver/load a dll without debug/admin privilegs. Also, depending on the method of hooking used, you might not get a correct result for some languages.

Would’nt it be fun to have some thing that can sniff every key that hits the keyboard? Keykeriki is something which will assist you with that. Now, Keykeriki is brought to you by the same guys, who also give you the very famous: BackTrack! Keykeriki allows you to achieve that by sniffing keyboard transmissions! The language or window type will not affect this little thing. The only thing is that the driver should be loaded.

Kyekeriki is an opensource hardware and software project enables every person to verify the security level of their own keyboard transmissions, and/or demonstrate the sniffing attacks. This hardware device can be powered directly via the USB bus or a stable 5V power source. For logging purposes, a SDCard interface has been built in the board. It uses uses one of the ATMEGA’s USART’s for interfacing with external hardware extensions. After ‘infecting’, you can either view using a terminal application or use the application provided by the authors themselves! The application is called as keyctrl. The board has the following interfaces:

  • Mini USB connector (USB to serial + power)
  • SDCard slot
  • External Antenna Connector
  • USART connector for ‘Backpacks’ (channel for future hardware extensions)

These are the features of the hardware & the software:

  • Radio frequency channel switching
  • Signal strength (RSSI) display
  • Data logging to SDCard
  • Dumping content of SDCard to terminal
  • Encryption key handling
  • On-the-fly deciphering of Microsoft’s XOR based encryption
  • Hardware signal filter state configuration
  • Feature state configuration incl. persistent storage
  • Activation and usage of backpack USART interface
  • Sniffing and decoding of keystrokes of Microsoft 27Mhz based keyboards

There are a few known extensions or backpacks (as the authors like to call them). They add functionalities such as:

  • LCD Backpack – Shows keystrokes on lcd
  • epeater Backpack – Sends the keystrokes using GPRS or other radio transmission
  • Iphone interface

Isn’t everything great about this little beast as of now? Well, as always, there is not everything in something. This beast wont work with Logitech keyboards. The technique has been researched by the author, but has not been implemented in this version. You will have to wait for the next version, or add it yourself.

Okay, so get the meat here:

Slides: Author slides from ph-neutral7d9 keykeriki_ph7d9.pdf
Hardware: keykeriki-hw-0.6.tar.gz (Eagle files, partlists, build howto)
Software: keykeriki-release-0.5.2.tar.gz > (Software & documentation)

Related External Links

  • » Hive Five Winner for Best Live CD: Backtrack [Hive Five Followup
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