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SPIES Lab, Computer Science and Engineering

Texas A&M University College of Engineering

Slogger

Defense against Smartphone Keyloggers

Recent research shows that it is possible to infer a user’s touchscreen inputs (e.g., passwords) on Android devices based on inertial (motion/position) sensors, currently freely-accessible by any Android app. Figure below shows the high level steps involved in motion based touchstroke logging attack. Given the high accuracies of such touchstroke logging attacks, they are now considered a significant threat to user privacy. Consequently, the security community has started exploring defenses to such side channel attacks, but the suggested solutions are either not effective (e.g., those based on vibrational noise) and/or may significantly undermine system usability (e.g., those based on keyboard layout randomization).

Figure1: Motion-based Touchstroke Logging Attack

Figure1: Motion-based Touchstroke Logging Attack


In this work, we introduce a novel and practical defense to motion-based touchstroke leakage based on system-generated, fully automated and user-oblivious sensory noise. Our defense leverages a recently developed framework, SMASheD, that takes advantage of the Android’s ADB functionality and can programmatically inject noise to various inertial sensors. Although SMASheD was originally advertised as a malicious app by its authors, we use it to build a defense mechanism, called Slogger (“Smashing the logger”), for defeating sensor-based touchstroke logging attacks. Slogger transparently inserts noisy sensor readings in the background as the user provides sensitive touchscreen input (e.g., password, PIN or credit card info) in order to obfuscate the original sensor readings. It can be installed in the user space without the need to root the device and to change the device’s OS or kernel. The figure below shows the notion of noise injection to obfuscate the original signal.

Figure2: Notion of sensor event injection to obfuscate the original signal

Figure2: Notion of sensor event injection to obfuscate the original signal

People

Faculty

  • Nitesh Saxena

Student

  • Prakash Shrestha (PhD student)
  • Manar Mohamed (@UAB; PhD 2016; instructional faculty of Computer Science at the Temple University)

Publication

  • Slogger: Smashing Motion-based Touchstroke Logging with Transparent System Noise.
    Prakash Shrestha, Manar Mohamed and Nitesh Saxena
    In ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec), July 2016
    [pdf]

Media Coverage

  • Research finds novel defense against sophisticated smartphone keyloggers, UAB News, Sept 02, 2016
  • UAB researchers find way around malicious attacks on Android devices, Birmingham Business Journal, Sept 08, 2016
  • UAB researchers find way around malicious attacks on Android devices, Tuscaloosa News.Net, Sept 09, 2016
  • Research finds novel defense against sophisticated smartphone keyloggers , Wn.com, Sept 02, 2016
  • Research Finds Novel Defense Against Sophisticated Smartphone Keyloggers, Public., Sept 02, 2016
  • Research finds novel defense against sophisticated smartphone keyloggers, TechXplore, Sept 05, 2016

Recent News

  • Paper accepted to CCS 2023 September 2, 2023
  • Paper accepted to PETS 2024 August 31, 2023
  • Paper accepted to CNS 2023 August 13, 2023
  • Paper accepted to MobiCom 2023 August 6, 2023
  • Presenting SPIES’ 13th PhD Graduate — Shalini Saini June 20, 2023
  • Dr. Saxena appointed as Associate Director of Cybersecurity Institute June 7, 2023
  • Saxena and team awarded $6M DOD grant on cognitive security May 3, 2023
  • Dr. Saxena appointed as the Vice Chair of EFAC May 3, 2023
  • Paper accepted to MobiSys 2023 May 2, 2023
  • Paper accepted to ICDCS 2023 April 11, 2023
  • Journal paper accepted to ACM Computing Surveys April 2, 2023
  • 3 full papers accepted to WiSec 2023 March 28, 2023
  • Paper accepted to Oakland 2023 March 14, 2023
  • Paper accepted to USENIX Security 2023 February 21, 2023
  • Cybersecurity Program Led By Dr. Saxena Ranks Best! January 26, 2023
  • EarSpy in Media January 26, 2023
  • Dr. Saxena is a Co-PI on Thematic AI Lab November 28, 2022
  • Paper accepted to PMC 2022 November 28, 2022
  • Paper accepted to ICISC 2022 November 28, 2022
  • A New Grant from NSA October 17, 2022

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