iPhone, Other Smartphones Can 'Spy' on Owners Typing on PCs, Says Ga. Tech Researchers
With the many advancements being made in gadgets and technology today, the possibility of hackers accessing and gathering personal information and passwords is always of high concern, and researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have revealed another cause for concern, especially for smartphone users.
According to a recent press release from the Georgia Institute of Technology, consumers may have another hacking method to worry about: the possibility of hackers tracking what they type through their phone if it is sitting just inches away on the desk next to their computer.
A research team at Georgia Tech accomplished just that by using a smartphone accelerometer, a device inside the phone that detects when and how it is tilted, to decipher complete sentences from keyboard vibrations, which it was able to do with up to 80 percent accuracy.
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Although it is not an easy feat, the research team said that it is definitely possible.
"We first tried our experiments with an iPhone 3GS, and the results were difficult to read," said Patrick Traynor, assistant professor in 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."
The method works through probablity and by detecting pairs of keystrokes and whether they were hit on the left or right side of the keyboard, up or down, and whether they were hit close together or far apart. Afterwards, the system compares the results with a loaded dictionary with each word being broken down in the same manner as the keystrokes, such as by where and in what direction the letters were hit. The technique, however, can only work reliably on words of three or more letters.
The statement from the group uses the word "canoe" as an example.
Canoe "breaks down into four keystroke pairs: 'C-A, A-N, N-O and O-E,' " the statement read. "Those pairs then translate into the detection system's code as follows: Left-Left-Near, Left-Right-Far, Right-Right-Far and Right-Left-Far, or LLN-LRF-RRF-RLF. This code is then compared to the preloaded dictionary and yields "canoe" as the statistically probable typed word. Working with dictionaries comprising about 58,000 words, the system reached word-recovery rates as high as 80 percent."
Although the team admits that tracking information about someone from their phone through nearby keyboard vibrations is possible, Traynor said it is highly unlikely.
"The likelihood of someone falling victim to an attack like this right now is pretty low," he said. "This was really hard to do. But could people do it if they really wanted to? We think yes."
