ICS News Archive

Tsudik to discuss Skype&Type at Black Hat Conference

Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Gene Tsudik will speak at the Black Hat USA 2017 Conference next month in Las Vegas. Tsudik will help lead a session on “Skype & Type: Keystroke Leakage over VoIP” with fellow presenters Daniele Lain and Mauro Conti of the University of Padua, and Alberto Compagno of Cisco Systems, Paris.

The conference briefing will discuss research Tsudik, Compagno, Conti and Lain published last year that describes a security breach whereby keystroke sounds, or acoustic emanations, can be recorded during a Skype voice or video call and later reassembled as text. They will present their Skype&Type (S&T) community tool and show how two popular VoIp software (Skype and Google Hangouts) convey enough audio information to reconstruct the input from keystroke noise.

The Black Hat conference, now in its 20th year, is hailed by many as the world’s leading information security event, providing attendees with four days of technical trainings followed by a two-day main conference showcasing the latest in cybersecurity research. Both offensive and defensive hackers can expect hands-on skill building taught by industry experts such as Tsudik.

Tsudik also currently serves as Director of the Secure Computing and Networking Center (SCONCE) at UCI and is a fellow of the ACM, IEEE and AAAS, as well as a foreign member of Academia Europaea.