DualStrike: Accurate, Real-time Eavesdropping and Injection of Keystrokes on Commodity Keyboards

Abstract

Commodity keyboards emit stray magnetic fields as they operate — an unintended side channel that can be captured by a nearby magnetometer. DualStrike is the first attack framework that simultaneously eavesdrops on keystrokes and injects phantom keystrokes on commodity keyboards without any physical modification, using only off-the-shelf magnetic sensing hardware.

Unlike prior work that only demonstrated one capability at a time, DualStrike achieves both in real time, revealing a previously underappreciated threat surface in the era of ubiquitous magnetic sensors. This work is the first to demonstrate a vulnerability inherent to magnetic sensing platforms.

Key Contributions

• First simultaneous keystroke eavesdropping and injection attack on commodity keyboards.
• Real-time operation using passive magnetic sensing — no physical access to target device required.
• Reveals a fundamental new vulnerability class in magnetic sensing platforms.
• Demonstrates the attack on a range of commercial keyboards with high accuracy.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{chen2026dualstrike,
  title     = {DualStrike: Accurate, Real-time Eavesdropping and Injection of Keystrokes on Commodity Keyboards},
  author    = {Chen, Xiaomeng and Wang, Jike and Chen, Zhenyu and Chen, Qi Alfred and Wang, Xinbing and Chen, Dongyao},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)},
  year      = {2026}
}