Stay Cool! Understanding Thermal Attacks on Mobile-based User Authentication

Abdelrahman, Yomna; Khamis, Mohamed; Schneegass, Stefan and Alt, Florian (6. May 2017): Stay Cool! Understanding Thermal Attacks on Mobile-based User Authentication. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 3751-3763

Abstract

PINs and patterns remain among the most widely used knowledge-based authentication schemes. As thermal cameras become ubiquitous and affordable, we foresee a new form of threat to user privacy on mobile devices. Thermal cameras allow performing thermal attacks, where heat traces, resulting from authentication, can be used to reconstruct passwords. In this work we investigate in details the viability of exploiting thermal imaging to infer PINs and patterns on mobile devices. We present a study (N=18) where we evaluated how properties of PINs and patterns influence their thermal attacks resistance. We found that thermal attacks are indeed viable on mobile devices; overlapping patterns significantly decrease successful thermal attack rate from 100% to 16.67%, while PINs remain vulnerable (>72% success rate) even with duplicate digits. We conclude by recommendations for users and designers of authentication schemes on how to resist thermal attacks.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Speech)
• EU Funded Grant Agreement Number: 683008
• EU Projects: Horizon 2020 > ERC Grants > ERC Consolidator Grant > ERC Grant 683008: AMPLIFY - Amplifying Human Perception Through Interactive Digital Technologies
• Form of publication: Submitted Version
• Keywords: mobile authentication, thermal imaging, touchscreens
• Faculties: Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics > Computer Science
• Subjects: 000 Computer science, information and general works > 004 Data processing computer science
• Place of Publication: New York, NY, USA
• Language: English