Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

4-2017

Abstract

Due to numerous benefits, sensor-rich smartwatchesand wrist-worn wearable devices are quickly gaining popularity.The popularity of these devices also raises privacy concerns. Inthis paper we explore one such privacy concern: the possibility ofextracting the location of a user’s touch-event on a smartphone,using the inertial sensor data of a smartwatch worn by the useron the same arm. This is a major concern not only because itmight be possible for an attacker to extract private and sensitiveinformation from the inputs provided but also because the attackmode utilises a device (smartwatch) that is distinct from thedevice being attacked (smartphone). Through a user study wefind that such attacks are possible. Specifically, we can infer theuser’s entry pattern on a qwerty keyboard, with an error boundof ±2 neighboring keys, with 73.85% accuracy. As a possiblepreventive mechanism, we also show that adding a little whitenoise to inertial sensor data can reduce the inference accuracyby almost 30%, without affecting the accuracy of macro-gesturerecognition.

Keywords

Inertial navigation systems, Smartphones, Ubiquitous computing, Wearable sensors, White noise

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

2017 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication Workshops (PerCom Workshops): Kona, HI, March 13-17

First Page

685

Last Page

690

ISBN

9781509043385

Identifier

10.1109/PERCOMW.2017.7917646

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/PERCOMW.2017.7917646

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