Exploiting the iPad's Glowing Keyboard

nonprofiteer writes "Earlier this week, a South African security researcher released shoulderPad, an app that's designed to auto-snoop on iPad users' passwords by watching their touchscreen keyboards. When a user types on an iPad's touchscreen, each key glows blue for a fraction of a second after it's struck, a helpful bit of feedback for any virtual keyboard. ShoulderPad's image recognition algorithms, based on Open CV's open source image recognition software, look for that flash of blue. 'At any distance, if the blue is distinguishable, shoulderPad can detect that keystroke,' says Meer."

Comments

Re:It's not even that hard

[mini me]

No, I'm serious. You can't change the SMS text tone on the iphone,

Being serious doesn't make it true. Even the iPhone 3G was given the feature quite some time ago.

Re:It's not even that hard

[rbrausse]

I never owned an iphone but I was curious.

and WTF, the way to change tones seems to be:

1. jailbreak the thing
2. convert your custom tone to AIFF
3. ssh to the phone
4. in /system/library/audio/uisounds overwrite the original files with your own file

*very* convenient, I still can't believe it