Data from smartphone sensors can be used to reveal PIN and passwords of your mobile devices to hackers

Data from your smartphone sensors can reveal PINs and passwords to hackers and allow them to unlock your mobile devices, according to a study led by an Indian-origin scientist. Using machine learning algorithms and a combination of information gathered from six different sensors found in smartphones, researchers succeeded in unlocking Android smartphones with a 99.5 percent 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 percent 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. So while a malicious application may not be able to correctly guess a PIN immediately after installation, using machine learning, it could collect data from thousands of users over time from each of their phones to learn their PIN entry pattern and then launch an attack later when the success rate is much higher. The study shows how devices with seemingly strong security can be attacked using a side-channel, as sensor data could be diverted by malicious applications to spy on user behaviour and help to access PIN and password information, said Professor Gan Chee Lip from NTU.