DualStrike: Accurate, Real-time Eavesdropping and Injection of Keystrokes on Commodity Keyboards
Xiaomeng Chen
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2026 · Day 3 · Covert Sensing
DualStrike is the first attack system to achieve both **eavesdropping and injection** on commodity **hall effect keyboards** -- a rapidly growing keyboard technology used primarily in gaming but expected to expand into laptops. By placing an array of electromagnets and magnetometers underneath a desk surface, the system can listen to keystrokes with near **100% accuracy** and inject characters at over **40 keystrokes per 200 milliseconds** (faster than a human eye blink), achieving **100% injection accuracy** across all 51 targeted keys.
AI review
A clean hardware attack that achieves both eavesdropping and keystroke injection on the emerging hall effect keyboard market, with 100% accuracy and injection speeds faster than human eye-blink. The 9-microtesla threshold for triggering keystrokes is a concrete, scary number. The end-to-end attack (monitor passwords, then inject malicious commands through a desk surface) is the kind of physical access attack that intelligence agencies would deploy. Open-sourced hardware and software make this reproducible.