Acoustic Emanation of Haptics as a Side-Channel for Gesture-Typing Attacks

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Presented at CyberScience2020 2020 by

Jonathan Smith-creasey

Abstract—In this paper, we show that analysis of acoustic emanations recorded from haptic feedbackduring gesture-typing sessions is a viable side-channel for carrying out eavesdropping attacks against mobiledevices. The proposed approach relies on acoustic emanation resulting from haptic events, namely the buzz of asmall vibration motor as the finger initiates the gesture typing of a work in a sentence. By analysing time betweenhaptic feedback events, it is possible to identify the text that a user enters via the soft keyboard on their device. Theattack requires no prior interaction or need to install software on the target device (unlike similar works); only theability to record audio within the vicinity. We present an experimental framework to illustrate the feasibility of theattack. In the experiments we show that sentences can be detected with an accuracy of 70% with some sentencesidentified with up to 95% accuracy. The attack can be conducted with minimal computation and on non-specialistconsumer equipment. The paper concludes by proposing a number of countermeasures that mitigate the ability ofan attacker to successfully intercept keyboard input.