Smartphones Are More Vulnerable Than You Think

Today, most people from 10 to 85 have a smartphone, although most of these users are unaware just how vulnerable to attacks these devices are.

In most cases, attacks on smartphones require physical access to the device and interactions with the touchscreen, but according to new academic research, it is possible to reach users' mobile touchscreen without touching it using electro-magnetic interference.

Modern Android smartphones are susceptible to a new type of attack named "GhostTouch" by researchers at China's Zhejiang University and the Technical University of Darmstadt that can induce fake finger taps to take unwanted actions that can execute taps and swipes on the phone’s screen, even from a distance of up to 40 mm. 

The attack exploits flaws at both the software and hardware level and has been proven to work even against the most recent smartphone models. 

GhostTouch uses electromagnetic interference (EMI) to inject fake touch points into a touchscreen without the need to physically touch it. By tuning the parameters of the electromagnetic signal and adjusting the antenna, we can inject two types of basic touch events, taps and swipes, into targeted locations of the touchscreen and control them to manipulate the underlying device.

According to the researchers’ findings, an attacker can use GhostTouch to carry out several types of malicious actions, including initiating calls and downloading malware.

Most of the touchscreens used today by smartphone and tablet companies are sensitive and vulnerable to the environmental impact of EMI. Previous studies have shown that EMI can disrupt the user experience of touchscreens and possibly cause random and harmful behavior. In one case, a phone that was placed on a charger booked a highly expensive hotel room because of EMI signals.

Researchers created the GhostTouch software in order to see if they could use EMI to create controllable touch events and trigger arbitrary behavior on touchscreens.

The core idea behind GhostTouch is to interfere with the capacitance measurement of touchscreens using electromagnetic signals injected into the receiving electrodes integrated into the touchscreen. GhostTouch is a targeted attack. The adversary must know the model and make use of the victim’s phone in order to tune the equipment. The attacker might also need extra information about the phone, such as the passcode, which they must acquire through social engineering or ‘shoulder surfing’.

These types of attacks usually occur in public locations such as cafes, open offices, libraries, etc. Places where people are not necessarily careful of how they place their smart devices. By embedding appropriate equipment under a specific table, the hacker will be able to launch attacks remotely.

The researchers tested GhostTouch on 11 widely used phone models and were able to implement the attack with varying degrees of success on nine models, demonstrating that EMI attacks are a real threat to today’s personal devices.

Mobile Phone Quality Is An Issue

Users can improve the security of their smartphone device by buying a high-end phone. Around 88% of all phones worldwide are Android devices of various types. The remaining 12% are Apple’s iOS design which is widely considered to have superior security. Android phones made by Google, including the Nexus and Pixel brands have security as good as Apple’s iPhone but users who are concerned about their security are well advised to avoid generic devices such as those from Huawei and Xiaomi.

Unwitting users introduce vulnerabilities into their smartphones voluntarily and by some estimates more than half of all smartphone users had downloaded some kind of unsafe files or content to their mobile device.

 USENIX Symposium:      Portswigger:      I-HLS:      CCSInet:     Guardian:     ZDNet:     Cyware:

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