Ingenious hack uses battery consumption to figure out what you're doing on your phone
The joint product of researchers at UT Texas, the Hebrew University, and Technion, a new paper aimed at considering smartphone security details a potentially devastating hack that would allow an attacker to use your battery as a 'snitch'.
The attack, currently only tested in a simulated environment, uses a microcontroller to turn a smartphone battery into a 'snitch' by sampling power flowing in and out of it, and correlating the different rates at which power is consumed to different actions.
The method could potentially be used to determine, for example, a keystroke, the context in which it was performed (e.g. what kind of application you are typing in) and "the events that preceded or followed it", like making a phone call. Tracking the power drawn by the various components like the CPU, GPU, screen and DRAM would even allow an attacker to glean information about which websites were visited or what keys were pressed - basically, a very sophisticated keylogger.
