How Your Smartphone Can Spy On What You Type 77
mikejuk writes "We all do it — place our phones down on the desk next to the keyboard. This might not be such a good idea if you want to keep your work to yourself. A team of researchers from MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology have provided proof of concept for logging keystrokes using nothing but the sensors inside a smartphone — an iPhone 4 to be precise, as the iPhone 3GS wasn't up to it. A pair of neural networks were trained to recognize which keys were being pressed just based on the vibration — and it was remarkably good at it for such a small device. There have been systems that read the keys by listening but this is the first system that can hide in mobile phone malware."
Re:Wonder the accuracy rate (Score:5, Informative)
Seems like an obscure sensing mechanismI wonder how accurate it is...
Just detecting raw keypresses didn't produce a very accurate result, but switching to picking up pairs of keywords and then using a word dictionary did produce useful data extraction. Accuracies of around 80% were achieved, but the accuracy reduced with the number of keypresses. Word recognition only achieved a 46% accuracy, but this increased to 73% if second choice words were included. Clearly semantic analysis could push the accuracy up.
Re:Wonder the accuracy rate (Score:5, Informative)
Its not accurate at all unless you have the luxury of training the neural networks with the phone sitting in EXACTLY the same place in EXACTLY the same orientation every time, in a totally vibration damped laboratory.
You have to locate your phone two inches from the keyboard every time.
Not on a piece of paper, a book or a mouse pad, but directly on the desk.
Oh, and you have to install software on your iphone,
AND feed the data into a a couple of Neural networks external to the phone.
And nothing else can be vibrating on that desk. No radio. No mouse movements, and your computer has to be off the desk.
No air conditioning air flow, not tapping fingers, typical floor bounce from walking people.
And no typing fast.
When you start reading all of the things that will screw up this test that the authors wrote in their own study you have
to wonder how it is they even managed to keep from laughing their own study out the door.
They just proved it can't be done in the real world, yet they went ahead and put out the study anyway as if
they had discovered a real and present attack vector.
So then the recommend you keep your phone outside the room. Who does that? Why do that, when
their own study demonstrates it is totally impossible to do this?