Smartphone WiFi Signals Can Leak Your Keystrokes, Passwords, and PINs (bleepingcomputer.com)

Bleeping Computer warns that "The way users move fingers across a phone's touchscreen alters the WiFi signals transmitted by a mobile phone, causing interruptions that an attacker can intercept, analyze, and reverse engineer to accurately guess what the user has typed...when the attacker controls a rogue WiFi access point." The new WindTalker attack leverages the "channel state information" in WiFi signals. An anonymous reader quotes their article: Because the user's finger moves across the smartphone when he types text, his hand alters CSI properties for the phone's outgoing WiFi signals, which the attacker can collect and log on the rogue access point... By performing basic signal analysis and signal processing, an attacker can separate desired portions of the CSI signal and guess with an average accuracy of 68.3% the characters a user has typed... but it can be improved the more the user types and the more data the attacker collects.
The new attack is described in a research paper titled "When CSI Meets Public WiFi: Inferring Your Mobile Phone Password via WiFi Signals."

Comments

JFC

[Etcetera]

People should assume that nothing is secure at this point. If you have an advanced device, someone will be able to spy on you.

Starting to wonder if the smartphone (advanced operating system, application ecosystem, sensors out the wazoo) are basically a net loss for society, even before you get to the actual cultural effects of mass, constant, information/internet use.

CSI?

[wonkey_monkey]

CSI is Channel State Information, in case you were wondering, since the editors don't do their jobs.