Smartphone passcode prediction

Abstract

Many people now own smartphones and store all their documents such as pictures and financial statements on their phone. To protect this sensitive information, people generally use a passcode to prevent unauthorised access to their phone. Shoulder-surfing attacks are well known. However, contrary to common belief, they are not easy to carry out. Shoulder-surfing attacks to predict the passcode by humans are shown to not be accurate. The authors thus propose an automated algorithm to accurately predict the passcode entered by a victim on her smartphone by recording the video. Their proposed algorithm is able to predict over 92% of numbers entered in fewer than 75 s with training performed once.