Well, that keylogger had its problems. Although it had a couple of pros in there too compared to my new keylogger. The problem it had was that it required you to have root privileges on the Linux system you run it on, because it needed to read from /dev/input/*
devices directly, which only the root user has permission to do. It also needed you to figure out which device node to read from ahead of time. And finally, it didn't work on some types of keyboards (I only tested it with a USB keyboard but I've heard reports from others that it just doesn't work for them).
The only pro it had was that it would log keys at the hardware level, including on text mode terminals.
And so, the new keylogger does not require root privileges! The new keylogger relies on the X Window System, though, but this is the de facto windowing system on just about every Linux/Unix system out there today. This also means it will only log keys entered into graphical applications (for desktop *nix users though, this would log keys for just about everybody) so users in a text-mode terminal won't be logged.
One issue I ran into though is that the xinput test
command seems to expect you to have a terminal (or TTY), i.e. that you run the command from a graphical terminal. So trying to read the output of this command in Perl caused some weird buffering issue, where the command wouldn't give any output until about 100 characters were typed. So, the script requires the IO::Pty::Easy
module which creates a virtual TTY so that xinput
believes you're running it from a real shell.
The new keylogger's source code can be found here. Have fun! :)
When run from a graphical terminal, the $DISPLAY environment variable is already set to your current X display, e.g. ":0.0". But when launched from a non-graphical environment, the script would need to set the value of $DISPLAY itself, in order for xinput
to know which X server to connect to.
Well, maybe if the keylogger changes up the value of $DISPLAY to log from different X servers it may be able to cross the partitions set up by Qubes. I'll have to investigate this further. (6)
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interesting!
mapped for my azerty keyboard http://pastebin.com/b2WZrTa8
i want to be free
yes
0.0063s
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