Hackers could guess your phone PIN using its sensor data

INSTRUMENTS in smart phones such as the accelerometer, gyroscope and proximity sensors represent a potential security vulnerability, according to researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), whose research was published in the openaccess Cryptology ePrint Archive on 6 Dec.

Using a combination of information gathered from six different sensors found in smart phones and state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning algorithms, the researchers succeeded in unlocking Android smart phones with a 99.5 per cent accuracy within only three tries, when tackling a phone that had one of the 50 most common PIN numbers.

The previous best phone-cracking success rate was 74 per cent for the 50 most common pin numbers, but NTU's technique can be used to guess all 10,000 possible combinations of four-digit PINs.

Led by Dr Shivam Bhasin, NTU Senior Research Scientist at the Temasek Laboratories @ NTU, researchers used sensors in a smart phone to model which number had been pressed by its users, based on how the phone was tilted and how much light is blocked by the thumb or fingers.

The researchers believe their work highlights a significant flaw in smart phone security, as using the sensors within the phones require no permissions to be given by the phone user and are openly available for all apps to access.-