Smartphones can do many things these days; they’re smart
after all. But did you know that they can spy
on you, and may even be able to get your password without you knowing? According to a
Wired article, the accelerometers in many popular mobile
devices -
which sense motion, vibration, and phone position - can be
hacked to record keystrokes when placed close enough to a computer
keyboard. Computer scientists at Georgia
Tech discovered this, after experimenting with a technique that can
decipher keystrokes onto a keyboard by simply detecting vibrations. The
data of possible keystrokes are then fed through an algorithm which
approximates the closest possible word in a dictionary database, and
then generates words — and even readable sentences — with an accuracy of
up to 80%.
How is this different from just tapping randomly on a keyboard or
table? It detects keystroke pairs and senses the proximity of the
vibrations to figure out the possible positions of the keys.
“We first tried our experiments with an iPhone 3GS, and the results
were difficult to read,” said Assistant Professor Patrick Traynor of
Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science. “But then we tried an iPhone
4, which has an added gyroscope to clean up the accelerometer noise,
and the results were much better. We believe that most smartphones made
in the past two years are sophisticated enough to launch this attack.”
Whether or not a hacker
attack to read what you type is going to hit soon, but you should at
least be wary of possible spyware in apps. If there’s ever going to be
an attack using this keystroke reading technique, I’m sure there’s going
to be a deterring, protective app for that.
Posted in: gadgets
