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Guessing smart phone PINs by monitoring the accelerometer

schneier.com

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Re: Guessing smart phone PINs by monitoring the accelerometer

#71
post #70

I came across an interesting solution to this while paying at a restaurant in Ecuador: they used an Android device which randomized the position of the numbers of the on-screen keypad before each transaction. The original intent is to make it much harder for onlookers to guess your pin based on finger movements. This could however apply equally well to the usecase of the article. It is a bit of a usability trade-off…

There's a potential secondary usability trade-off. I only know my PIN by the pattern it makes on the keys. I don't actually have the numbers memorized, just the positional order on a standard keypad layout. So if the numbers are randomized, I would have a really hard time.

That's sort of a feature, because it forces you to adopt a strategy that prevents this type of exploit.

Re: Guessing smart phone PINs by monitoring the accelerometer

#72
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Y. S. Ryu, D. H. Koh, B. L. Aday, X. A. Gutierrez, and J. D. Platt. Usability evaluation of randomized keypad. Journal of Usability Studies, 5(2), 2010. https://uxpajournal.org/usability-evaluation-of-randomized-k...

Thanks! That's indeed interesting. What I was hoping somebody would study is the ability of practiced thieves to get the PIN under both circumstances. But this does indeed show that it's slower, which would certainly make shoulder-surfing easier. One quibble I have with the study is that they used novel PINs. I know I'm much faster when typing my real PIN than an arbitrary one. So I suspect the time penalty for rando…

What are Novel PINs? Some kind of OTP? (I already saw dynamic CVVs but that's stored on the card)
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