Cracking passwords with the aid of keyboard sound

Slashdot reports about a scary report published by three students at UC-Berkley. They were able to recover 96 percent of characters typed during a session by using a 10 minute sound recording of a keyboard.

The students say their methods don't even require a training text in order to calibrate the conversion algorithm as has been used previously.

They further claim to be able to unveil 90 percent of 5-character random passwords using only letters in fewer than 20 attempts and 80 percent of 10-character passwords can be generated in fewer than 75 attempts.

More details at Slashdot.