A Prototype for Generating Random Key Sounds to Prevent Keyboard Acoustic Side-Channel Attacks

Side-channel attacks exploit involuntary information leakages from devices, such as power consumption, electromagnetic radiation, visible light, or acoustic emanations. The objective of these attacks is to gain unauthorized access to data, such as passwords or other sensitive information. In particular, the keyboard acoustic side-channel attacks take advantage of the sound emanating from keystrokes to decipher which keys have been pressed by the user by comparing the produced sounds with a recorded dataset. This paper proposes a prototype that generates false and random keystroke sounds that are mixed with real keystroke sounds, to mitigate the impact of a keyboard acoustic side-channel attack. It includes three security modes - low, medium, and high, each offering different levels of protection and user customization. This is accomplished by generating random key sounds and also randomizing the number of key sounds to play and the time between the generated key sounds, during the real keystroke sound. To test the proposed prototype, a dataset was generated and used to assess the security modes execution. The results show that the sound of the real keystrokes is scrambled with the fake keystrokes sounds, making it difficult to decipher which keys have been pressed by the user.