How can your ultra useful motion sensor sniff your password?

What is it about?

Probably nobody thought of motion sensors (such as accelerometer and gyroscope) as a source of threat on our privacy. After all, sensors are not active elements that can initiate any action; they just report some innocent (and very useful) measurement s on motion of the their host phone. That was until 2011 at least, when few researchers noticed that the motion of the body of the phone carry some information about what the user is doing. If the measurements are precise enough, the motion that can be revealed might include even the typing of words. When you tap on the right side of the phone screen, the readings of the sensors are not the same as when you type on the left side of it. taking this idea to the extreme, what about distinguishing individual numbers or key? This concept looked very strange few years ago, but quite a few works have been published on the same recently. In this article, we are reviewing those works, explaining the basic technique and discussing several related issues along the way.

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Why is it important?

The first work on tap-based keyword inference was published in 2011. Quite a few works followed suite. This article, to the best of my knowledge is the first that surveys the first works in this research line, providing a (hopefully) valuable insight on the new type of mobile threat, which should pave the way for other researchers to catch up.