New threats surface for Smartphones!

Thanks to research in the field of security the general public is made aware of threats that any new technology may present. According to researchers at the University of California found a way how to decipher the keys pressed by a smartphone user simply by reading vibrations from the inbuilt motion sensors such as, smartphones’ accelerometers and gyroscopes.

Briefly, touching the smartphone’s keyboard may lead to loss of confidential data, how? An Android keylogger application developed by Hao Chen and Liang Cai is able to measure the physical motions captured through the phone’s accelerometer.

In their paper they clearly state that the primary goal is to raise awareness of the sensitivity of motion sensor data. With the application they have developed – TouchLogger, they demonstrated an attack which infers keystrokes on touch screen smartphones with motion sensors. Once the user installs TouchLogger and grants it the motion sensor privilege, it starts to monitor motions and infer keystrokes.

Read the full paper here:

http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~hchen/paper/hotsec11.pdf

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