Passphrases Beat Thermal Attacks: Evaluating Text Input Characteristics Against Thermal Attacks on Laptops and Smartphones - Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021 Access content directly
Conference Papers Year : 2021

Passphrases Beat Thermal Attacks: Evaluating Text Input Characteristics Against Thermal Attacks on Laptops and Smartphones

Abstract

We investigate the effectiveness of thermal attacks against input of text with different characteristics; we study text entry on a smartphone touchscreen and a laptop keyboard. First, we ran a study (N = 25) to collect a dataset of thermal images of short words, websites, complex strings (special characters, numbers, letters), passphrases and words with duplicate characters. Afterwards, 20 different participants visually inspected the thermal images to attempt to identify the text input. We found that long and complex strings are less vulnerable to thermal attacks, that visual inspection of thermal images reveals different parts of the entered text (36% on average and up to 82%) even if the attack is not fully successful, and that entering text on laptops is more vulnerable to thermal attacks than on smartphones. We conclude with three learned lessons and recommendations to resist thermal attacks.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
520518_1_En_41_Chapter.pdf (1.84 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
Origin : Files produced by the author(s)

Dates and versions

hal-04215498 , version 1 (22-09-2023)

Licence

Attribution

Identifiers

Cite

Yasmeen Abdrabou, Reem Hatem, Yomna Abdelrahman, Amr Elmougy, Mohamed Khamis. Passphrases Beat Thermal Attacks: Evaluating Text Input Characteristics Against Thermal Attacks on Laptops and Smartphones. 18th IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT), Aug 2021, Bari, Italy. pp.712-721, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-85610-6_41⟩. ⟨hal-04215498⟩
15 View
1 Download

Altmetric

Share

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More