Privacy

32482 readers

385 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

143

Keyboard spyware? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by vis4valentine@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

68 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I was taking a look at the Naomi Wu situation (A Chinese DIY tech youtuber who went missing after being watched by the government) and in one part they mentioned that she was concerned about her privacy, so started using Signal, but had a default chinese keyboard that had a keylogger and the police had looked into what she was talking on there.

I'm not sure if it was a mobile only thing, but it was mentioned that the keyboard app was used in like 70% por chinese smarthphones.

Now, I use AnySoftKey and refuse to use default keyboard apps, but how far can we reach on the keyboard security thing? Is typing on a computer or using a physical keyboard on a mobile device 100% safe? I think the keyboard issue is often overlooked and would like to know what recommendations your have? Or what should be known more?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wayland's core protocol doesn't allow it, but extensions to enable things like global hotkeys can almost certainly be used for shenanigans.

But does it work without prompting the user?
Also, I'm not too familiar with how it works, but afaik global hotkeys on KDE are implemented by the display server/compositor/whatever it's called itself, and not sourced out to a different program.

Also, if the keylogger is running under your user account, it can insert crafted .desktop files wrapping around your apps, ptrace your apps, you name it.

Well, that's an interesting point, I haven't thought about that.

[–] argv_minus_one@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But does it work without prompting the user?
Also, I’m not too familiar with how it works, but afaik global hotkeys on KDE are implemented by the display server/compositor/whatever it’s called itself, and not sourced out to a different program.

Right, but they're configured by an unprivileged program: the settings app. Presumably, a keylogger can pretend to be the settings app.

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Presumably, a keylogger can pretend to be the settings app.

Couldn't the display server check if the app is actually the settings app by looking at it's executable's location? Not sure how reliable that is, but if it is, it could check if it is coming from somewhere in /usr that is also not writable by the current user.

[–] argv_minus_one@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The display server has no way of verifying the process ID on the other end of the Unix-domain socket connection, and therefore cannot verify the executable image. It also cannot verify that the settings app hasn't had any malicious code injected with ptrace, LD_PRELOAD, or the like, since the injected code can remove any traces of that before connecting to the display server.