Most of us go to really great lengths to ensure our passwords are complicated, secure and un-crackable.

But now they're inventing robots that literally can just listen to us type and figure it out.

A team of UK researchers has trained a deep learning model to interpret keystrokes remotely based solely on audio.

By recording keystrokes to train the model, they were able to predict what was typed on the keyboard with up to 95% accuracy. This accuracy dropped to 93% when using Zoom to train the system.

So you're telling me that all the time I invest in complying with password strength requirements, thinking up something I haven't used before, capitalizing everything in a completely chaotic manner — you're saying this bot can figure it out just by hearing me type "S!lverSuRf@r1985"?

That doesn't seem fair. I might as well just make my password "password" and be done with it.

The scientific term for the sound of your keystrokes, by the way, is "keyboard acoustic emanations." The scientists taught the AI by pressing a bunch of different keys a bunch of times:

There were enough subtle differences in the waveforms produced by the recording for [the AI] to recognise each key with a startling degree of accuracy.

Guess I'm gonna start relying on those random password generators more often now!

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