POC Android Trojan uses motion sensor to sniff keystrokes
A team of researchers from Pennsylvania State University (PSU) and IBM have designed a proof-of-concept Android Trojan app that can steal passwords and other sensitive information by using the smartphone's motion sensors to determine what keys victims tap on their touchscreens when unlocking their phones or inputting credit card numbers during phone banking operations.
The Trojan horse is dubbed TapLogger by its creators and was designed to demonstrate how data from a smartphone's accelerometer and orientation sensors can be abused by applications with no special security permissions to compromise privacy.
TapLogger was created by Zhi Xu, a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at PSU, Kun Bai, a researcher at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and Sencun Zhu, an associate professor of Computer Science and Engineering at PSU's College of Engineering.
