Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Emmanuel Owusu, Jun Han, Sauvik Das, Adrian Perrig, Joy Zhang. "ACCessory: Keystroke Inference using Accelerometers on Smartphones". To appear in Proceedings of The Thirteenth Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile), ACM, 28, February, 2012.

Abstract
The security and privacy risks posed by smartphone sensors such as microphones and cameras have been well documented. However, the importance of accelerometers have been largely ignored. We show that accelerometer readings can be used to infer the trajectory and starting point of an individual who is driving. This raises concerns for two main reasons. First, unauthorized access to an individual’s location is a serious invasion of privacy and security. Second, current smartphone operating systems allow any application to observe accelerometer readings without requiring special privileges. We demonstrate that accelerometers can be used to locate a device owner to within a 200 meter radius of the true location. Our results are comparable to the typical accuracy for handheld global positioning systems.

Electronic downloads

• han_ACComplice_comsnets12-1.pdf · application/pdf · 916 kbytes

• HTML

  Emmanuel Owusu, Jun Han, Sauvik Das, Adrian Perrig, Joy
  Zhang. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/843.html"
  >ACCessory: Keystroke Inference using Accelerometers on
  Smartphones</a>, To appear in Proceedings of The
  Thirteenth Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and
  Applications (HotMobile), ACM, 28, February, 2012.

• Plain text

  Emmanuel Owusu, Jun Han, Sauvik Das, Adrian Perrig, Joy
  Zhang. "ACCessory: Keystroke Inference using
  Accelerometers on Smartphones". To appear in
  Proceedings of The Thirteenth Workshop on Mobile Computing
  Systems and Applications (HotMobile), ACM, 28, February,
  2012.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{OwusuHanDasPerrigZhang12_ACCessoryKeystrokeInferenceUsingAccelerometersOnSmartphones,
      author = {Emmanuel Owusu and Jun Han and Sauvik Das and
                Adrian Perrig and Joy Zhang},
      title = {ACCessory: Keystroke Inference using
                Accelerometers on Smartphones},
      booktitle = {To appear in Proceedings of The Thirteenth
                Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and
                Applications (HotMobile)},
      organization = {ACM},
      day = {28},
      month = {February},
      year = {2012},
      abstract = {The security and privacy risks posed by smartphone
                sensors such as microphones and cameras have been
                well documented. However, the importance of
                accelerometers have been largely ignored. We show
                that accelerometer readings can be used to infer
                the trajectory and starting point of an individual
                who is driving. This raises concerns for two main
                reasons. First, unauthorized access to an
                individual’s location is a serious invasion of
                privacy and security. Second, current smartphone
                operating systems allow any application to observe
                accelerometer readings without requiring special
                privileges. We demonstrate that accelerometers can
                be used to locate a device owner to within a 200
                meter radius of the true location. Our results are
                comparable to the typical accuracy for handheld
                global positioning systems.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/843.html}
  }
  

Posted by Mary Stewart on 4 Apr 2012.
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