Patent ID: 9342687
Filing Date: 2016-05-17
CPC Classification: G06F,H04L

Claim Text:
1. A method for detecting synthetic keystrokes, the method comprising: maintaining a record of one or more physical keystrokes of physical keyboard input detected by an operating system of a computer from a program routine in a kernel space of a computer memory of the computer that directly contacts keyboard input/output ports of the computer; detecting, by a synthetic keystroke detector in a user space of the computer memory, a keystroke received at a computer application process that is executed by the computer; comparing the record of one or more physical keystrokes of the physical keyboard input to the keystroke received at the computer application process; based on the comparison, determining that the keystroke received at the computer application process is absent from the record of physical keystrokes of the physical keyboard input; identifying the keystroke received by the computer application process as being a synthetic keystroke; and performing a predefined security-related action, wherein the predefined security-related action includes at (i) notifying a user of the synthetic keystroke and (ii) withholding the synthetic keystroke from the computer application process.