Keyboard Security: A Technological Review

The keyboard is the most widely used input device in the computing environment. Authentication systems also usually need keyboards to acquire user passwords. Even though a perfect crypto technology is deployed into the authentication system, it becomes useless if the password from the keyboard is stolen as a plain text form. Therefore, several solutions have been introduced to protect passwords from keyboard. However, these solutions have not been sustainable to protect passwords, due to some compromising vulnerabilities. This paper explores recent critical vulnerabilities to the keyboard security and technologically analyzes various offensive and defensive aspects of the keyboard interfaces and their security mechanisms.