Entries Tagged "cell phones"

Page 18 of 29

Guessing Smart Phone PINs by Monitoring the Accelerometer

“Practicality of Accelerometer Side Channels on Smartphones,” by Adam J. Aviv. Benjamin Sapp, Matt Blaze, and Jonathan M. Smith.

Abstract: Modern smartphones are equipped with a plethora of sensors that enable a wide range of interactions, but some of these sensors can be employed as a side channel to surreptitiously learn about user input. In this paper, we show that the accelerometer sensor can also be employed as a high-bandwidth side channel; particularly, we demonstrate how to use the accelerometer sensor to learn user tap and gesture-based input as required to unlock smartphones using a PIN/password or Android’s graphical password pattern. Using data collected from a diverse group of 24 users in controlled (while sitting) and uncontrolled (while walking) settings, we develop sample rate independent features for accelerometer readings based on signal processing and polynomial fitting techniques. In controlled settings, our prediction model can on average classify the PIN entered 43% of the time and pattern 73% of the time within 5 attempts when selecting from a test set of 50 PINs and 50 patterns. In uncontrolled settings, while users are walking, our model can still classify 20% of the PINs and 40% of the patterns within 5 attempts. We additionally explore the possibility of constructing an accelerometer-reading-to-input dictionary and find that such dictionaries would be greatly challenged by movement-noise and cross-user training.

Article.

Posted on February 15, 2013 at 6:48 AM • View Comments

Anti-Surveillance Clothing

It’s both an art project and a practical clothing line.

…Harvey’s line of “Stealth Wear” clothing includes an “anti-drone hoodie” that uses metalized material designed to counter thermal imaging used by drones to spot people on the ground. He’s also created a cellphone pouch made of a special “signal attenuating fabric.” The pocket blocks your phone signal so that it can’t be tracked or intercepted by devices like the covert “Stingray” tool used by law enforcement agencies like the FBI.

Posted on January 14, 2013 at 1:27 PM • View Comments

Apple Turns on iPhone Tracking in iOS6

This is important:

Previously, Apple had all but disabled tracking of iPhone users by advertisers when it stopped app developers from utilizing Apple mobile device data via UDID, the unique, permanent, non-deletable serial number that previously identified every Apple device.

For the last few months, iPhone users have enjoyed an unusual environment in which advertisers have been largely unable to track and target them in any meaningful way.

In iOS 6, however, tracking is most definitely back on, and it’s more effective than ever, multiple mobile advertising executives familiar with IFA tell us. (Note that Apple doesn’t mention IFA in its iOS 6 launch page).

EDITED TO ADD (10/15): Apple has provided a way to opt out of the targeted ads and also to disable the location information being sent.

Posted on October 15, 2012 at 1:21 PM • View Comments

Scary Android Malware Story

This story sounds pretty scary:

Developed by Robert Templeman at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indiana and a few buddies from Indiana University, PlaceRader hijacks your phone’s camera and takes a series of secret photographs, recording the time, and the phone’s orientation and location with each shot. Using that information, it can reliably build a 3D model of your home or office, and let cyber-intruders comb it for personal information like passwords on sticky notes, bank statements laying out on the coffee table, or anything else you might have lying around that could wind up the target of a raid on a later date.

It’s just a demo, of course. but it’s easy to imagine what this could mean in the hands of criminals.

Yes, I get that this is bad. But it seems to be a mashup of two things. One, the increasing technical capability to stitch together a series of photographs into a three-dimensional model. And two, an Android bug that allows someone to remotely and surreptitiously take pictures and then upload them. The first thing isn’t a problem, and it isn’t going away. The second is bad, irrespective of what else is going on.

EDITED TO ADD (10/1): I mistakenly wrote this up as an iPhone story. It’s about the Android phone. Apologies.

Posted on October 1, 2012 at 6:52 AM • View Comments

Police Sting Operation Yields No Mobile Phone Thefts

Police in Hastings, in the UK, outfitted mobile phones with tracking devices and left them in bars and restaurants, hoping to catch mobile phone thieves in the act. But no one stole them:

Nine premises were visited in total and officers were delighted that not one of the bait phones was ‘stolen’. In fact, on nearly every occasion good hearted members of the public handed them to bar or security staff.

I’m not sure about the headline: “Operation Mobli deters mobile phone thieves in Hastings.”

There are two things going on here. One, people are generally nice and will return property to its rightful owner. Two, it’s hard for the average person to profit from a stolen cell phone. He already has a cell phone that’s assigned to his phone number. He doesn’t really know if he can sell a random phone, especially one assigned to the number of someone who had her phone stolen. Yes, professional phone thieves know what to do, but what’s the odds that one of those is dining out in Hastings on a particular night?

Posted on July 26, 2012 at 6:55 AM • View Comments

All-or-Nothing Access Control for Mobile Phones

This paper looks at access control for mobile phones. Basically, it’s all or nothing: either you have a password that protects everything, or you have no password and protect nothing. The authors argue that there should be more user choice: some applications should be available immediately without a password, and the rest should require a password. This makes a lot of sense to me. Also, if only important applications required a password, people would be more likely to choose strong passwords.

Abstract: Most mobile phones and tablets support only two access control device states: locked and unlocked. We investigated how well allornothing device access control meets the need of users by interviewing 20 participants who had both a smartphone and tablet. We find all-or-nothing device access control to be a remarkably poor fit with users’ preferences. On both phones and tablets, participants wanted roughly half their applications to be available even when their device was locked and half protected by authentication. We also solicited participants’ interest in new access control mechanisms designed specifically to facilitate device sharing. Fourteen participants out of 20 preferred these controls to existing security locks alone. Finally, we gauged participants’ interest in using face and voice biometrics to authenticate to their mobile phone and tablets; participants were surprisingly receptive to biometrics, given that they were also aware of security and reliability limitations.

Posted on July 12, 2012 at 12:59 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.