Android Security Threat From 'Reverse Smudge Engineering'

Eat a lot of potato chips? Then consider avoiding one of the ways Google offers to unlock an Android device.

Google's mobile operating system lets people unlock devices by swiping a particular pattern across a three-by-three grid of dots. But Android evangelist Tim Bray raised a concern about "reverse smudge engineering" to figure out the unlock pattern.  "A couple of colleagues had my original Galaxy Tab and needed to use it for something, but I wasn't there. They managed to figure out my pattern by looking at the fingerprints on the glass, and it only took them a few minutes," Bray said in a post yesterday.

I suspect it's probably not a huge problem for those of us who keep phones in a pocket that will swipe the screen. But I can't help but notice that my unpocketable Galaxy Tab 10.1 has a lot of fingerprints on it right now and that sometimes I can tell what game was being played on the family iPad by the smudges.