Apple iPhone’s next spying trick – keylogging using the accelerometer

Users have a hard enough time dealing with all the crapware, malware, and other nasties that are dreamed up by folks looking to mess you over by stealing your information anyway that they can without any help from people who are suppose to be the good guys.

It seems though that some rather clever researchers at Georgia Tech and MIT have discovered a new, and admittedly very clever, way to record your keystrokes if you are using an iPhone.

Simply put, they have figured out how to use the accelerometer of all things to record your keystrokes. Now that might sound just a little more than strange since the the accelerometer has no relation with the virtual keyboard used in the iPhone. However principal researcher Patrick Traynor, assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science has developed a proof of concept that shows it is possible.

The methodology is outlined in a paper title “(sp)iPhone: Decoding Vibrations From Nearby Keyboards Using Mobile Phone Accelerometer” and the method is correct 80 percent of the time with a 58,000 word dictionary.

While the method can’t reliably pinpoint a single keystroke it does identify keystrokes by identifying the successive strokes as left-right, right-left, left-left, or right-right; and then that information is statistically analyzed to represent letter pairs which are then compared against a dictionary.

The paper will be presented at the 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security which is currently underway.

via Ars Technica