Matias Mini Quiet Pro and Secure Pro review

[Muirium]

Just a minor addition to the review: the Secure pro apparently has transposition problems, probably related to the piss-poor wireless dongle. More to come after I sleep this pounding headache off.

Transposition errors are there for added security! Even if some master snoop can see your keystrokes, they still can't see your passwords…

[Julle]

So, here's the story. When I first received the Secure Pro, I found myself correcting familiar words often, mostly in situations where two letters in the word had switched places. Because I only used it for a brief period of time for review purposes, I thought it might be because of a switch I've never used before.

However, when using the Mini Quiet Pro I have not experienced such problems at all. Then a couple of weeks later my friend to whom I gave the Secure Pro reported the same phenomenon. I didn't tell him what had occurred previously when I gave the keyboard to him. Therefore, it wasn't just my imagination/progressing insanity.

I suspect the problem lies in the wireless receiver or transmitter. Whichever the case, I really wish Matias had used Bluetooth. I'm not really familiar with Bluetooth because I don't use it all that often, but I'm under the impression Bluetooth traffic is encrypted.

I don't know if I received a defective unit or if the problem is more widespread.

[Muirium]

Bluetooth keyboard traffic is indeed encrypted. Otherwise we would have heard loads of horror stories of stolen passwords from millions around the world until it was made encrypted after all! Passwords are so vital to security that encryption is an absolutely basic part of wireless keyboard protocols*. (Passwords are dumb, and future generations will think we were nuts, but we haven't escaped them yet.)

Matias makes a big deal out of the security of this keyboard as a marketing talking point. It probably is some tougher encryption algorithm again. But if it can't handle it right, then, hmm. Rather defeats the point of long, secure passwords.

*Speaking of which, I'm making one. I'd better ask Kile if he has security baked in! No worries for me though, as I'm not going into mass production. It's a custom.

[bhtooefr]

Bluetooth uses E0 with an 8 to 128 bit key length (or encryption can be disabled). And, there have been successful attacks on even optimal E0 implementations over a long time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E0_%28ciph ... ptanalysis