Seeing double: reconstructing obscured typed input from repeated compromising reflections

  • Authors:

  • Yi Xu;Jared Heinly;Andrew M. White;Fabian Monrose;Jan-Michael Frahm

  • Affiliations:

  • UNC Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, N. Carolina, USA;UNC Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, N. Carolina, USA;UNC Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, N. Carolina, USA;UNC Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, N. Carolina, USA;UNC Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, N. Carolina, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Of late, threats enabled by the ubiquitous use of mobile devices have drawn much interest from the research community. However, prior threats all suffer from a similar, and profound, weakness - namely the requirement that the adversary is either within visual range of the victim (e.g., to ensure that the pop-out events in reflections in the victim's sunglasses can be discerned) or is close enough to the target to avoid the use of expensive telescopes. In this paper, we broaden the scope of the attacks by relaxing these requirements and show that breaches of privacy are possible even when the adversary is around a corner. The approach we take overcomes challenges posed by low image resolution by extending computer vision methods to operate on small, high-noise, images. Moreover, our work is applicable to all types of keyboards because of a novel application of fingertip motion analysis for key-press detection. In doing so, we are also able to exploit reflections in the eyeball of the user or even repeated reflections (i.e., a reflection of a reflection of the mobile device in the eyeball of the user). Our empirical results show that we can perform these attacks with high accuracy, and can do so in scenarios that aptly demonstrate the realism of this threat.