Really interesting research: “Lend Me Your Ear: Passive Remote Physical Side Channels on PCs.” Abstract: We show that built-in sensors in commodity PCs, such as microphones, inadvertently capture electromagnetic side-channel leakage from ongoing computation. Moreover, this information is often conveyed by supposedly-benign channels such as audio recordings and common Voice-over-IP applications, even after lossy compression. … Read More “Side Channels Are Common” »
Category: sensors
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They’re not that good: Security researchers Jesse D’Aguanno and Timo Teräs write that, with varying degrees of reverse-engineering and using some external hardware, they were able to fool the Goodix fingerprint sensor in a Dell Inspiron 15, the Synaptic sensor in a Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and the ELAN sensor in one of Microsoft’s own Surface … Read More “Breaking Laptop Fingerprint Sensors” »
Interesting article about civilians using smartphones to assist their militaries in wartime, and how that blurs the important legal distinction between combatants and non-combatants: The principle of distinction between the two roles is a critical cornerstone of international humanitarian law—the law of armed conflict, codified by decades of customs and laws such as the Geneva … Read More “Smartphones and Civilians in Wartime” »
The new 802.11bf standard will turn Wi-Fi devices into object sensors: In three years or so, the Wi-Fi specification is scheduled to get an upgrade that will turn wireless devices into sensors capable of gathering data about the people and objects bathed in their signals. “When 802.11bf will be finalized and introduced as an IEEE … Read More “Wi-Fi Devices as Physical Object Sensors” »
This clever attack allows someone to uniquely identify a phone when you visit a website, based on data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer sensors. We have developed a new type of fingerprinting attack, the calibration fingerprinting attack. Our attack uses data gathered from the accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer sensors found in smartphones to construct … Read More “Fingerprinting iPhones” »
Interesting research: The trick in accurately tracking a person with this method is finding out what kind of activity they’re performing. Whether they’re walking, driving a car, or riding in a train or airplane, it’s pretty easy to figure out when you know what you’re looking for. The sensors can determine how fast a person … Read More “Tracking People Without GPS” »
Websites are sending information prematurely: …we discovered NaviStone’s code on sites run by Acurian, Quicken Loans, a continuing education center, a clothing store for plus-sized women, and a host of other retailers. Using Javascript, those sites were transmitting information from people as soon as they typed or auto-filled it into an online form. That way, … Read More “Websites Grabbing User-Form Data Before It’s Submitted” »
There has been a flurry of research into using the various sensors on your phone to steal data in surprising ways. Here’s another: using the phone’s ambient light sensor to detect what’s on the screen. It’s a proof of concept, but the paper’s general conclusions are correct: There is a lesson here that designing specifications … Read More “Stealing Browsing History Using Your Phone’s Ambient Light Sensor” »
Interesting acoustic attack against the MEMS accelerometers in devices like FitBits. Millions of accelerometers reside inside smartphones, automobiles, medical devices, anti-theft devices, drones, IoT devices, and many other industrial and consumer applications. Our work investigates how analog acoustic injection attacks can damage the digital integrity of the capacitive MEMS accelerometer. Spoofing such sensors with intentional … Read More “Acoustic Attack Against Accelerometers” »