Now this might matter. If there's a phone line near the surveilled computer, then no blackbag op is necessary. Thus, "fishing" is much easier. If they've got to roll the trucks, then they'll probably need to have something fairly concrete to nail you with. -TD

From: John Kelsey <kelsey.j@ix.netcom.com> Reply-To: John Kelsey <kelsey.j@ix.netcom.com> To: "J.A. Terranson" <measl@mfn.org>, "cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net" <cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net> Subject: Re: Tyler's Education Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2004 09:32:19 -0400 (GMT-04:00)

From: "J.A. Terranson" <measl@mfn.org> Sent: Jul 4, 2004 12:57 AM To: "cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net" <cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net> Subject: Re: Tyler's Education

Interestingly, I have had more than one report of aural acquistion of typists keystrokes being used to attempt to calculate the content of a short keysequence (I assume a password is what was meant by "short keysequence"). These reports indicated "poor, but occasionally lucky results".

I wonder if this follows the technique used by Song, Wagner, & Tian to attack SSH-encrypted passwords by watching keystroke timings.

J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org

--John Kelsey

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