• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.89-95
• /
• 2008

This paper analyzes the intrinsic vulnerability problems of the authentication system for Internet commerce based on the ID and password strings gathered from the computer keyboard. Through the found vulnerability, it is easy to sniff user passwords as well as any other keyboard inputs even when each of the existing keyboard protection softwares is running. We propose several countermeasures against the possible attacks to the vulnerability at both points of the hardware and the software concerns. The more secure environment for Internet commerce is highly required by implementing the proposed countermeasures.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
• /
• v.18 no.4
• /
• pp.187-194
• /
• 2008

This paper proposes an effective countermeasure to an intrinsic hardware vulnerability of the keyboard controller that causes sniffing problem on the password authentication system based on the keyboard input string. Through the vulnerability, some possible attacker is able to snoop whole the password string input from the keyboard even when any of the existing keyboard protection software is running. However, it will be impossible for attackers to gather the exact password strings if the proposed policy is applied to the authentication system though they can sniff the keyboard hardware protocol. It is expected that people can use secure Internet commerce after implementing and applying the proposed policy to the real environment.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
• /
• v.21 no.3
• /
• pp.177-182
• /
• 2011

This paper introduces a possibility for attackers to acquire the keyboard scan codes through using the RESEND command provided by the keyboard hardware itself, based on the PS/2 interface that is a dominant interface for input devices. Accordingly, a keyboard sniffing program using the introduced vulnerability is implemented to prove the severeness of the vulnerability, which shows that user passwords can be easily exposed. As one of the intrinsic vulnerabilities found on the existing platforms, for which there were little considerations on the security problems when they were designed, it is required to consider a hardware approach to countermeasure the introduced vulnerability.