Your smartwatch is giving away your ATM PIN

spiry-btc (0)(1)in #technology • 8 years ago (edited)

Wearable devices can give away your passwords, according to new research.

In the paper "Friend or Foe?: Your Wearable Devices Reveal Your Personal PIN" scientists from Binghamton University and the Stevens Institute of Technology combined data from embedded sensors in wearable technologies, such as smartwatches and fitness trackers, along with a computer algorithm to crack private PINs and passwords with 80-percent accuracy on the first try and more than 90-percent accuracy after three tries."Wearable devices can be exploited," said Yan Wang, assistant professor of computer science within the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science at Binghamton University. "Attackers can reproduce the trajectories of the user's hand then recover secret key entries to ATM cash machines, electronic door locks and keypad-controlled enterprise servers."Wang is a co-author of the study along with Chen Wang, Xiaonan Guo, Yingying Chen, and lead researcher Bo Liu from the Stevens Institute of Technology. The group is collaborating on this and other mobile device-related security and privacy projects.