I aways wondered if the communication channel between my wireless keyboard and the usb receiver-antena is secure. I never bother to reseach this. Today I figured out the practical way. I turned on my pc at work and I tried to type the first letter of my password. Nothing hapened. Then I started spamming that letter. Still nothing, until the person next to me said “my keyboard is typing all by itself”. It turns out she has a wireless mouse with a seemigly identical receiver-antena usb.

The moral of the story. If it was so easy to almost leak my password unintentionally due to this flaw of wireless keyboard communication, imagine wad a bad actor can do intentionally. Why try to brute force, social engineer e.t.c. when your password can be stollen in transit from your keyboard to your pc.

Used to work in an office where dell’s wireless peripherals would every once in a while randomly enter pairing mode and connect to someone else’s machine… often to the humor of those nearby. Their tech was based on Logitech’s older Unifying stuff but I have no idea what they were thinking when adding auto pairing to it.

For wireless peripherals do research beforehand if this is something you’re worried about. Personally I stick with newer logitech stuff, which encrypt the connection and don’t start auto-pairing when peripherals are switched on

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