### Chemical Combinatorial Attacks on Keyboards

Eric Brier, David Naccache, and Pascal Paillier

##### Abstract

This paper presents a new attack on keyboards. \smallskip The attack consists in depositing on each keyboard key a small ionic salt quantity ({\sl e.g.} some NaCl on key 0, some KCl on key 1, LiCl on key 2, SrCl$_2$ on key 3, BaCl$_2$ on key 4, CaCl$_2$ on key 5...). As the user enters his PIN, salts get mixed and leave the keyboard in a state that leaks secret information. Nicely enough, evaluating the entropy loss due to the chemical trace turns out to be a very interesting combinatorial exercise. \smallskip Under the assumption that mass spectroscopic analysis can reveal with accuracy the mixture of chemical compounds generated by the user, we show that, for moderate-size decimal PINs, the attack would generally disclose the PIN. \smallskip The attack may apply to door PIN codes, phone numbers dialed from a hotel rooms, computer keyboards or even ATMs. \ss While we did not implement the chemical part of the attack, a number of mass spectrometry specialists confirmed to the authors its feasibility.

Available format(s)
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. chemistry attack keyboard combinatorics entropy
Contact author(s)
david naccache @ gemplus com
History
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2003/217

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2003/217,
author = {Eric Brier and David Naccache and Pascal Paillier},
title = {Chemical Combinatorial Attacks on Keyboards},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2003/217},
year = {2003},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2003/217}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2003/217}
}

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