Keystroke timing analysis of on-the-fly web apps

Abstract

The Google Suggestions service used in Google Search is one example of an interactivity rich Javascript application. In this paper, we analyse the timing side channel of Google Suggestions by reverse engineering the communication model from obfuscated Javascript code. We consider an attacker who attempts to infer the typing pattern of a victim. From our experiments involving 11 participants, we found that for each keypair with at least 20 samples, the mean of the inter-keystroke timing can be determined with an error of less than 20%. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.