A Design of Secure and Reliable Wireless Keyboards and Mice Against Man-In-The-Middle Attacks1

It has been publicly known that keyboards and mice, either wired or wireless, can be potentially attacked by eavesdropping or hijacking. Although there are many secure keyboards and some secure mice in the market, there are still vulnerabilities under different types of Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks such as hijack or replay. Usually these attacks are low cost and easy to implement, but so far there have not been any effective solutions to them. This paper proposes a protection scheme against the existing and potential MITM attacks to wireless keyboards and mice while keeping a low overhead in hardware and energy consumption, which is critical to battery powered devices. This lightweight scheme can also be applied to other wireless devices sensitive to battery life such as implantable medical devices. Index terms — keyboard, mouse, security, eavesdropping, hijack, tampering, replay, man-in-the-middle, encryption, authentication, AES, AMD, error control codes.