How Your Smartphone Can Spy On What You Type

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."

Comments

Wow! What a vulnerability!!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

First you need to download and install a neural network program in your smartphone, train it with loads and loads of data. Then turn it on and leave it running. Then it can become a keystroke logger. At this point it worse than the proverbial unix virus, "You got a unix virus. It works on honor system. Please forward this mail to all addresses in your .mailrc and sudo \rm -rf / Thank you."

Re:Wonder the accuracy rate

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like an obvious question, I wonder if you can read.

Nothing new

[TheInternetGuy]

I have an IBM type M keyboard, and this post was relayed to slashdot via the Global Seismographic Network