Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Swift-Keylogger – Keylogger for MacOS written in Swift using HID

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 84 posts

Re: Swift-Keylogger – Keylogger for MacOS written in Swift using HID

#21

Post by imron »

TrickyRick wrote: post #11
imron wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but Apple seems to have implemented things rather well here. Reading up on it further [0] it seems you could write an anti-keylogger. Just have an app that calls EnableSecureEventInput and never disables it and no other processes would be able to capture key input: "The system will no longer pass keyboard intercept processes keyboard events if your process has enabled secure input even when your process is moved to…

Although that would probably break some apps. See for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15488964

I'm sure it would, so you could have an icon in the task bar that could temporarily enable keylogging again.

Re: Swift-Keylogger – Keylogger for MacOS written in Swift using HID

#22

Post by jwandborg »

passivepinetree wrote: post #12
dangero wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I once spent a whole day debugging an issue related to this because I was unaware of it. I was getting a game Steam ready and I was working on the Steam overlay that is triggered by the tab key. QA reported that on the login screen, you sometimes had to press tab twice to get the overlay to open. Just on that one screen. I had a piece of code that was looking for the tab keydown event to open the overlay, but in…

Interesting anecdote. What did you end up doing? Did you just leave it as-was?

S?he probably listened to the keyup event instead.

Re: Swift-Keylogger – Keylogger for MacOS written in Swift using HID

#25

Post by Iv »

passivepinetree wrote: post #12
dangero wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I once spent a whole day debugging an issue related to this because I was unaware of it. I was getting a game Steam ready and I was working on the Steam overlay that is triggered by the tab key. QA reported that on the login screen, you sometimes had to press tab twice to get the overlay to open. Just on that one screen. I had a piece of code that was looking for the tab keydown event to open the overlay, but in…

Interesting anecdote. What did you end up doing? Did you just leave it as-was?

I guess he looked for key-up events.

Re: Swift-Keylogger – Keylogger for MacOS written in Swift using HID

#28

Post by sneak »

sametmax wrote: post #5
dannyw wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if macOS had the same permissions models as iOS, and then some. A permission before apps can access the camera, or access what keys are held down when the app isn't in the foreground - that would block this case.

This would effectively kill innovation. There is a reason you can't do half the things you do on a laptop on a phone unless you root said phone.

There is also a reason I can do 99% of the things I do on a laptop on my (totally sandboxed, not rooted) iPad Pro.

Re: Swift-Keylogger – Keylogger for MacOS written in Swift using HID

#29

Post by NiveaGeForce »

nfoz wrote: post #15
dannyw wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if macOS had the same permissions models as iOS, and then some. A permission before apps can access the camera, or access what keys are held down when the app isn't in the foreground - that would block this case.

Yes, it would be very nice if operating systems had a sane (let alone user-friendly!) way to properly, thoroughly sandbox userland applications. It's a large reason why "web applications" became a thing -- it gives you sandboxed remote programs (and easy-access to boot!) Even if the web-browsing sandbox is flawed, it's been a convenient band-aid over a fundamental OS feature that, sadly, still doesn't properly exist.

Like UWP on Windows.
Post reply on HN