Slashdot Mirror
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."
There was an episode of MI5 (aired as "Spooks" in the UK) that had this many years ago.
They gave a foreign agent a document to type, and had an eavesdropping device in his office. By recording the keyclicks of the known document, they were able to train the system to decode keyclicks for subsequent documents.
It didn't seem farfetched at the time, it doesn't seem farfetched today.