Ding-Ding. We may have a winner!

Very true. Whistleblowing was invented for officials to disclose marked-up, tagged and shrewdly redacted information. There is an international organization of whistleblowers to assure a steady flow, funded by shadowy sources. Beyond that obviously professional outlet there are: Open and secret generous grants available to scholars, renegades, freedom fighters, hackers, siphoners, aggregators, search engines, coders, Tors, leakers, spammers, Chinese, Iranians, Israelis, rogues, drug kingpins, kiddie porn baiters, civil liberty unions, unions, agitators, organizers of the poor and the filthy rich, tweeters and speakers, priests and TLC givers, every conceivable exceedingly fine-grained minority and social and economic injustice aggrievers, Wall Street and off-shore greeders, why there is hardly any way to avoid getting a piece of the pie directly or indirectly, say, through an amazingly lucky break and recognition of your long-overlooked talent, a door opened just for you and your angry bitch gnawing your deadbeat balls. Whistleblowing is a satisfying blow job. That's a recruiting slogan.

On Fri, 19 Aug 2011, Michael Nelson wrote:

Don't know if you saw this one. Would apply to pinpads...

"Thermal cameras can steal ATM PINs" http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44178369/ns/technology_and_science-security/ Mike

Old news. We were doing that in the early "aughts". I'm waiting for a pinpad that maintains a uniform temperature to get around this. //Alif -- I hate Missouri. Land of the free, home of the perjuriously deranged.

Simply wire some wire behind the keys and heat them in irregular patterns, also make them run quite hot. Don't make the wires to small to produce an IDable pattern upon the keys. Never let them cool to close to room temperature. That way whatever pattern there is in the heating (now cooling) of the buttons cannot be the buttons pressed. Also it keeps the snow of the board. Lewis 2011/8/23 Michael Nelson

J.A. Terranson wrote:

...

Old news. We were doing that in the early "aughts". Yes, it had a familiar ring to it... I was wondering what the UCSD people meant as their contribution. Presumably getting it to work in the ATM setting.

Same family of attacks as the thin powder or other film over the keypad. A friend of mine who worked for the govt, had an rsa "Pwnie-Token", and he said that after a several years the buttons that he used for the PIN developed indentations...

...

I'm waiting for a pinpad that maintains a

uniform temperature to get around this.

Hard to achieve sufficiently quick response. How about the keys have independent heating elements so that they can be randomized. And of course there is the distribution of heat across each key surface...

Mike