Is there a way to detect simulated keyboard/mouse input on Windows. For example, a user types something on his keyboard vs sendKeys/PostMessage/On-screen keyboard. Is there a way that I can distinguish between the two?
EDIT: Perhaps an example would help. I am making a game and want to distinguish between real input vs WinAPI synthesizing keyboard/mouse messages.
I might be wrong, but the on-screen keyboard (and other applications that simulate user input) most probably uses the SendInput API:
SendInput operates at the bottom level of the input stack. It is just a backdoor into the same input mechanism that the keyboard and mouse drivers use to tell the window manager that the user has generated input.
Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/12/21/10107494.aspx
So there is probably no way to tell whether the input is coming from a "real" keyboard or not.
The only way to distinguish between "real" input and "simulated" input (assuming it is being generated with keybd_event()
/mouse_event()
or SendInput()
) is to use a low-level keyboard/mouse hook via SetWindowsHookEx()
. The WH_KEYBOARD_LL
and WH_MOUSE_LL
hook callbacks provide INJECTED
flags for simulated input.
Starting form Windows 8 there's the GetCurrentInputMessageSource
function. You can use it, and check the originId
enum for the following value:
IMO_INJECTED
- The input message has been injected (through the SendInput
function) by an application that doesn't have the UIAccess attribute set to TRUE
in its manifest file.