Researchers say hackers can monitor movements to reveal passwords

Wearable devices can give away your passwords, researchers have warned. They say that by hacking movement sensors inside devices, hackers can gather enough information to guess what a user is typing.

They say this could be an ATM PIN or even a password. ‘Wearable devices can be exploited,’ said Yan Wang, assistant professor of computer science within the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science at Binghamton University.

‘Attackers can reproduce the trajectories of the user’s hand then recover secret key entries to ATM cash machines, electronic door locks and keypad-controlled enterprise servers.’

In the paper scientists combined data from embedded sensors in wearable technologies, such as smartwatches and fitness trackers, along with a computer algorithm to crack private PINs and passwords with 80-percent accuracy on the first try and more than 90-percent accuracy after three tries.

Researchers conducted 5,000 key-entry tests on three key-based security systems, including an ATM, with 20 adults wearing a variety of technologies over 11 months.

The team was able to record millimeter-level information of fine-grained hand movements from accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers inside the wearable technologies regardless of a hand’s pose.

Those measurements lead to distance and direction estimations between consecutive keystrokes, which the team’s ‘Backward PIN-sequence Inference Algorithm’ used to break codes with alarming accuracy without context clues about the keypad.

According to the research team, this is the first technique that reveals personal PINs by exploiting information from wearable devices without the need for contextual information.

The threat is real, although the approach is sophisticated,’ Wang added.

‘There are two attacking scenarios that are achievable: internal and sniffing attacks.

‘In an internal attack, attackers access embedded sensors in wrist-worn wearable devices through malware.

‘The malware waits until the victim accesses a key-based security system and sends sensor data back.

‘Then the attacker can aggregate the sensor data to determine the victim’s PIN.

‘An attacker can also place a wireless sniffer close to a key-based security system to eavesdrop sensor data from wearable devices sent via Bluetooth to the victim’s associated smartphones.’

Daily Mail

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