Proof-of-Concept Android Trojan Uses Motion Sensors To Steal Passwords

judgecorp writes "TapLogger, a proof-of-concept Trojan for Android developed by resarchers at Pennsylvania State University and IBM, uses information from the phone's motion sensor to deduce what keys the user has tapped (PDF), thus revealing otherwise-hidden information such as passwords and PINs."

Comments

Franklin said it best.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who would give up essential usability to purchase a little temporary security, deserve neither usability nor security.

Re:Well, that's pretty clever

[YodasEvilTwin]

I always give pedos access to my vibration sensors.

Re:New Wave of Virus

[SJHillman]

Blackberry is the OS/2 of the mobile world.

Fixing This Will Damage Science

[ScentCone]

We use the internal motion sensors on Android phones to provide all of the inertial navigation input we need to control the external thrusters on the capsules of the hihg altitude balloons we send up for biometric testing of the subjects inside. The subjects, usually kids about five years old, play Angry Birds and type out phrases of Shakespeare until they black out. If they disable background motion sensor use, it's possible we're going to lose more like 8 out of 10 kids we send up, instead of the usual 5 or 6. I can see already that we might have to go back to using spider monkeys, or those expensive parrots. Which means re-working the whole app, again. Man, science is hard.