geekhack
geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: Phaedrus2129 on Sat, 13 November 2010, 15:58:31
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Does anyone know of any current or vintage mechanical keyboards that were wireless? Only one I know is that one modded Model M. Any others?
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there was a bluetooth filco that didnt make it outside Japan
I think as soon as you introduce wireless it makes the reliability suffer, opposite to what going mechanical achieves in the first place
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Over at KBC someone made a Ducky 1087 bluetooth. Here is the link:
http://bbs.kbc-china.com/thread-3733-1-2.html
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I may have the only wireless mechanical in North America. The Model M guy was a Kiwi.
:)
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Here is the only one I saw during my trip to Japan.
(http://lh3.ggpht.com/_6WOoTO_7VuQ/TDGC4YH8yrI/AAAAAAAABzM/EMtQ1-Lpn3o/s800/2010-06-12%2010.51.29.jpg)
(http://lh6.ggpht.com/_6WOoTO_7VuQ/TDGC6oQqbjI/AAAAAAAABzM/7ixTUwAAi4g/s800/2010-06-12%2010.51.38.jpg)
And it wasn't even in Akihabara. Fukuoka of all places.
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I will be designing my own controller, starting sometime after the first of the year. Being I have extensive experience in designing Bluetooth enabled devices, it will certainly have Bluetooth connectivity. And it will most certainly be designed for use on mechanical keyboards, namely one or more variant of IBM mechanical switches. Not sure if my initial prototype will include the Bluetooth function or if I'll wait till the second. Also I don't have any plans as yet to commercially market the controller, though I might get a few Geekhackers to help me test a beta.
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I have what I'm assuming is an IR keyboard. It has black Cherries, and it is pretty old. I haven't bothered with trying to get it to work with a pc yet, though.
http://geekhack.org/showthread.php?t=10108&highlight=8_inch_floppy
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I have what I'm assuming is an IR keyboard. It has black Cherries, and it is pretty old. I haven't bothered with trying to get it to work with a pc yet, though.
http://geekhack.org/showthread.php?t=10108&highlight=8_inch_floppy
O.o
That's probably the strangest keyboard I've seen on Geekhack yet. A Cherry keyboard with the layout of the IBM Model F XT that's wireless?
wut
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... it will certainly have Bluetooth connectivity.
How is the security in BT? I've successfully refused to look into BT protocols for a whole decade. Just from internet, I gather it's kinda weak.
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There are some security holes with Bluetooth. The fairly recently released v2.1 made some improvements. I've not yet designed a Bluetooth keyboard so not exactly sure what the security issues will be with it specifically. I'm assuming most Bluetooth keyboards would use the HID profile, which I'm not presently familiar with. In thinking about it only very quickly, I can see two possible security issues.
1) If someone were able to eavesdrop on your connection and capture all your keystrokes, they could obtain some sensitive information.
2) If someone were able to mimic your Bluetooth keyboard, and if your computer was unattended while you were logged in, they might be able to type some commands to retrieve sensitive information on your computer. However, I think this is extremely unlikely, due to they wouldn't likely be able to view your screen while doing this.
I don't think the second issue needs much addressing being the likelihood of someone pulling this off is very small and it can easily be prevented by not allowing your computer to sit unattended.
For the first issue, like I said, I have no real experience. If you want the keyboard to work in a standard fashion though, such as able to connect to a Mac as-is, then I imagine you don't have any options in making the connection any more secure than what Apple designed. I did once design a Bluetooth product where I had complete control over both ends, with both ends being run on microcontrollers. I designed my own proprietary Bluetooth stack, encrypted the data being transmitted, plus the raw data was just a bunch of numbers and some control fields. Pairing between two devices was fixed in the lab before the units were deployed and new pairing was not allowed. There were also a few other security safeguards put in place which I cannot mention. So I believe in that case the system was pretty secure.
If I was to attempt to sell commercially my keyboard controller, and I thought security would be a concern of some of the buyers, I'd probably do something similar to the previously mentioned product. Being my controller would be targeted at a high-end keyboard, the cost of the controller wouldn't really be an issue. So building my own proprietary Bluetooth stack to run on the micocontroller would be easy. For a mass-marketed keyboard, it's likely not so feasible, being they'd first have to find a firmware engineer capable of designing their own Bluetooth stack (not so trivial), and need to probably use a more expensive microcontroller than what they intended which had enough memory to support the stack. Add to that encrypting the data, and secured pairing, and I imagine it would be secure enough to keep out all but the most determined and capable hackers. Of course I'd also need to support the standard HID protocol for users of Macs, etc. where they might not be able to or want to add the keyboard's customized Bluetooth dongle. In which case the user would have to choose between the more secure connection or a less-secure but standard connection.
Anyways, I'm not giving too much thought to the security at the moment. I'll cross that bridge when the time comes.
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Does wireless mechanical keyboard have any latency or performance issues ?
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@Sam: Yes, it's the eavesdropping that I am worried about. I had a wireless BT keyboard (with USB dongle that presents itself as a regular USB HID), but for sensitive stuff I used a second wired keyboard. Pairing was done by a dedicated switch, but I don't even know whether it used some mandatory BT encryption or not. All in all - I don't trust BT at all, so that's why I asked. It's so easy to leave security hole - intentionally or not.
Your plan to do hard-paired BT communication (possibly on lower level than BT HID) with encryption sounds just about right.