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

Posted by Soulskill on from the for-when-normal-keylogging-is-just-too-precise dept.

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."

5 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. yikes! by noh8rz3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We talk often about mobile viruses and I've become somewhat inured to it (another malware embedded in rogue angry birds? yawn). But this is scary, brave new world scary.

    1. Re:yikes! by tchuladdiass · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The reason this is significant is that apps are usually installed with limited access to items it doesn't need. So normally a bad app won't be able to steal passwords, or lift your address book, unless you give it permissions. This demonstration is simply showing a covert channel for information leakage that people may not have thought about before.

  2. Swype by Pat+Attack · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder if it would work on those of us who use a Swype keyboard. Then again, I do tap out my passwords. A thought: If you randomize the keyboard for password entries, that would make it harder to discern from malware like that and the over-the-shoulder attack.

  3. Well, that's pretty clever by jfengel · · Score: 5, Informative

    According to TFA, the idea is actually somebody else's and previously published. This is an extension of the idea that uses a training phase, presumably a part of the Trojan where the user interacts with the phone for benign reasons (perhaps playing a game or entering data for a legitimate purpose) that it uses to calibrate the correlation between taps and the accelerometers.

    It's pretty clever. Presumably, it can be defeated by refusing to allow background apps to have access to the sensors, though I can imagine applications where you want to allow that kind of thing (pedometers, for example).

  4. Re:I find this hard to believe by SJHillman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's not a perfect attack, but it doesn't need to be successful against every single user on every single phone. Most modern smartphones don't require physical abuse to register motion and most smartphone users don't put the phone down, put the password in, then pick it back up every single time. How about an analogy? Let's say there's a PC virus that exploits the wheel function of a USB mouse. Not every PC will have a USB mouse with a wheel, and even among those that do, not every user will use it. However, there's still enough vulnerable PCs that this theoretical virus could be highly successful.