Georgia Tech Turns iPhone Into spiPhone
ATLANTA -- Oct. 18, 2011 -- It's a pattern that no doubt repeats itself daily in hundreds of millions of offices around the world: People sit down, turn on their computers, set their mobile phones on their desks and begin to work. What if a hacker could use that phone to track what the person was typing on the keyboard just inches away?
A research team at Georgia Tech has discovered how to do exactly that, using a smartphone accelerometer-the internal device that detects when and how the phone is tilted-to sense keyboard vibrations and decipher complete sentences with up to 80 percent accuracy. The procedure is not easy, they say, but is definitely possible with the latest generations of smartphones.
"We first tried our experiments with an iPhone 3GS, and the results were difficult to read," said Patrick Traynor, assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Computer Science. "But then we tried an iPhone 4, which has an added gyroscope to clean up the accelerometer noise, and the results were much better. We believe that most smartphones made in the past two years are sophisticated enough to launch this attack."
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