Android can have a serious problem for those who use patterns for unlocking instead of access codes, and this is because a new hack shows us how easily these can be intercepted by hackers. More precisely, a new technique called SonarSnoop can turn an ordinary phone into a sonar to interpret the movements that a user makes on the screen, and in the case of Android, the special pattern for unlocking can also be detected.
Android is vulnerable here because it allows the use of patterns to unlock phones, and their microphones and speakers can be used to interpret how we move our fingers on the screen. They can be used for many other purposes, apparently including to detect what we write when we have the phone placed next to a sheet of paper, and for now the method has only been demonstrated for Android phones, and in the iPhone it is hard to say if it can be reproduced .
Android can be SPART by Transforming Phone into Sonar
Android was used by a group of researchers to demonstrate this technique to hack phones because this operating system allows the use of microphones and speakers to retrieve data and analyze it. A special application is used in Android to retrieve information regarding the movements that users make around a smartphone, and the technique itself can be used to spy on extremely many people who own a smart phone.
"Academics from universities in Sweden and the UK have come up with a new technique that turns a smartphone's built-in speaker and microphone into a crude sonar system to steal phone unlock patterns from Android devices. The technique consists of using a malicious app on the device to emit sound waves from the phone's speakers at frequencies inaudible to the human ear –between 18kHz and 20kHz."
Android does not have any protection measure against such a system, and this is because users must manually install the application that can retrieve this data, and must give it access to the microphone and speaker. In the case of iPhone and iOS, it is unlikely that the analysis of everything that happens around the users can be analyzed as easily as in the case of Android, but of course everything depends on the way Apple checks the applications published in the App Store.
