Title
Using hover to compromise the confidentiality of user input on Android
Abstract
We show that the new hover (floating touch) technology, available in a number of today's smartphone models, can be abused by malicious Android applications to record all touchscreen input into applications system-wide. Leveraging this attack, a malicious application running on the system is able to capture sensitive input such as passwords and PINs, record all user's social interactions, as well as profile user's behavior. To evaluate our attack we implemented Hoover, a proof-of-concept malicious application that runs in the background and records all input to all foreground applications. We evaluated Hoover with 20 users, across two different Android devices and two input methods, stylus and finger. In the case of touchscreen input by finger, Hoover estimated the positions of users' clicks within an error of 100 pixels and keyboard input with an accuracy of 79%. Hoover captured users' input by stylus even more accurately, estimating users' clicks within 2 pixels and keyboard input with an accuracy of 98%. Differently from existing well-known side channel attacks, this is the first work that proves the security implications of the hover technology and its potential to steal all user inputs with high granularity. We discuss ways of mitigating this attack and show that this cannot be done by simply restricting access to permissions or imposing additional cognitive load on the users since this would significantly constrain the intended use of the hover technology.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3098243.3098246
WISEC
Keywords
Field
DocType
Android, hover technology, user input, attack
Android (operating system),Confidentiality,Computer security,Computer science,Touchscreen,Stylus,Pixel,Password,Side channel attack,Cognitive load
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5084-6
1
0.35
References 
Authors
22
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Enis Ulqinaku110.35
Luka Malisa2234.30
Julinda Stefa347725.18
Alessandro Mei430516.96
Srdjan Capkun54970390.04