Re:Keystroke Recognition Using WiFi Signals (2015) [pdf]
by tigroferoce on Thursday August 25, 2016 @04:36AM
(#12357626)
I agree on this point. A controlled environment is different from real world. It's not the first paper on this types of attacks: I remember one where the microphone of an iPhone was used to register the sound of keypressed on a keyboard [1] and another one where the vibrations on objects were used to infer the oral communication inside a closed room [2].
The main consideration is that it largely depends on who is your attacker. If you think about regular people, you should be fine; state-sponsored attackers know way too many techniques for you to be safe, unless you get very paranoid. Also keep in mind that these attacks (AFAIK) do not scale and are not automated, so a state attacker should be explicitly targeting you.
Finally, you should consider that modern computers and mobile phones have so many security issues that using these advanced physical-world attacks is not necessary.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_cryptanalysis [2] http://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibr...
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/538/