Mobile Phones Know Your Keystrokes through the Sounds from Finger’s Tapping on the Screen

Abstract

Mobile phones nowadays are equipped with at least dual microphones. We find when a user is typing on a phone, the sounds generated from the vibration caused by finger’s tapping on the screen surface can be captured by both microphones, and these recorded sounds alone are informative enough to infer the user’s keystrokes. This ability can be leveraged to enable useful application designs, while it also raises a crucial privacy risk that the private information typed by users on mobile phones has a great potential to be leaked through such a recognition ability. In this paper, we address two key design issues and demonstrate, more importantly alarm people, that this risk is possible, which could be related to many of us when we use our mobile phones. We implement our proposed techniques in a prototype system and conduct extensive experiments. The evaluation results indicate promising successful rates for more than 4000 keystrokes from different users on various types of mobile phones.