All your keyboards are belong to us!
Federico Lucifredi
DEF CON 33 (backfill) · Day 1 · Main Stage
In this comprehensive DEF CON talk, Federico Lucifredi, an experienced embedded engineer and co-founder of an R&D shop, delves into the often-overlooked and repeatedly rediscovered world of keyboard side-channel attacks. The presentation, titled "All your keyboards are belong to us!", meticulously explores how these ubiquitous input devices, which handle plaintext data before it's encrypted or hashed, can be exploited for both data exfiltration and command injection. Lucifredi highlights the critical vulnerability of keyboards across various attack vectors, from historical electromagnetic emanations to modern acoustic analysis leveraging artificial intelligence and even the subtle flickering of LEDs.
AI review
A competent survey of keyboard side-channel attacks spanning TEMPEST, acoustic analysis, optical channels, MouseJack, and USB injection — well-organized and historically grounded, but fundamentally a literature review rather than original research. No new CVEs, no novel attack chains, no original tooling beyond referencing a hobbyist web-assembly demo that didn't even run live.