Malware Uses Smartphone Accelerometers to Steal Keystrokes

Did you know your smartphone's accelerometer can be used to steal keystrokes from a nearby keyboard?

Using an iPhone 4 and some pirate software they wrote, a team of researchers at Georgia Tech has managed to capture complete sentences from a nearby keyboard with up to 80 percent accuracy.

"The way we see this attack working is that you, the phone's owner, would request or be asked to download an innocuous-looking application, which doesn't ask you for the use of any suspicious phone sensors," team member Henry Carter, a PhD student in computer science and one of the paper's co-authors, explains. "Then the keyboard-detection malware is turned on, and the next time you place your phone next to the keyboard and start typing, it starts listening." The team initially tried to use an iPhone 3GS in their experiments, but the results were too difficult to read.