United States. A group of researchers from the University of Cambridge developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system that can crack mobile device passwords just by listening to the sound of keys.
"When a user touches the screen with one finger, the touch generates a sound wave that propagates on the surface of the screen and in the air. We found that the device's microphone(s) can retrieve this wave and "hear" the touch of the finger, and wave distortions are characteristic of the location of the touch on the screen," the researchers say.
For the test were needed a total of 45 users, in a real environment, who used Android mobiles and tablets, it was there where they discovered alarming results. The researchers created an Android application which is nourished by AI to use the microphones and sensors of the mobile, to take advantage of the dynamics that we mentioned.
According to the report, for the tablet, they recovered 61% of 200 4-digit PINs in 20 attempts, even if the model is not trained with the victim's data. For the smartphone, we retrieved 9 words of size 7–13 letters with 50 attempts at a reference point.
It is important to note that this app is not commercial, as it was only created for experimental purposes. The researchers propose a number of measures to prevent these types of attacks, from better operating system support to measures to control the hardware.
Source: WWWhatsnew.
