Pay attention! your smartphone sensors can reveal your PIN 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. Instruments in smartphones such as the gyroscope and proximity sensors represent a potential security vulnerability, researchers from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore said. 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 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 Shivam Bhasin, NTU Senior Research Scientist, researchers used sensors in a smartphone 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.