Jeff Yan

Aurélien Bourquard, Jeff Yan

Developed at MIT CSAIL, the Wallcamera has captivated the public's imagination. Here, we show that the key insight underlying the Wallcamera is the same one that underpins the concept and the prototype of differential imaging forensics (DIF), both of which were validated and reported several years prior to the Wallcamera's debut. Rather than being the first to extract and amplify invisible signals -- aka latent evidence in the forensics context -- from wall reflections in a video, or the first to propose activity recognition following that approach, the Wallcamera's actual innovation is achieving activity recognition at a finer granularity than DIF demonstrated. In addition to activity recognition, DIF as conceived has a number of other applications in forensics, including 1) the recovery of a photographer's personal identifiable information such as body width, height, and even the color of their clothing, from a single photo, and 2) the detection of image tampering and deepfake videos.

Jeff Yan

We study a set of high-profile scams that were well engineered and have hit people hard in China in recent years. We propose a simple but novel theoretical framework to examine psychological, situational and social fabric factors that have played a role in these scams. We also use this framework as a tool to explore scam countermeasures. In so doing, we identify how these Chinese scams differ from their Western counterparts.

Aurélien Bourquard, Jeff Yan

We introduce some new forensics based on differential imaging, where a novel category of visual evidence created via subtle interactions of light with a scene, such as dim reflections, can be computationally extracted and amplified from an image of interest through a comparative analysis with an additional reference baseline image acquired under similar conditions. This paradigm of differential imaging forensics (DIF) enables forensic examiners for the first time to retrieve the said visual evidence that is readily available in an image or video footage but would otherwise remain faint or even invisible to a human observer. We demonstrate the relevance and effectiveness of our approach through practical experiments. We also show that DIF provides a novel method for detecting forged images and video clips, including deep fakes.

Jeff Yan

Inspired by Gambetta's theory on the origins of the mafia in Sicily, we report a geo-concentrating phenomenon of scams in China, and propose a novel economic explanation. Our analysis has some policy implications.

Ilia Shumailov, Laurent Simon, Jeff Yan et al.

We present the first acoustic side-channel attack that recovers what users type on the virtual keyboard of their touch-screen smartphone or tablet. When a user taps the screen with a finger, the tap generates a sound wave that propagates on the screen surface and in the air. We found the device's microphone(s) can recover this wave and "hear" the finger's touch, and the wave's distortions are characteristic of the tap's location on the screen. Hence, by recording audio through the built-in microphone(s), a malicious app can infer text as the user enters it on their device. We evaluate the effectiveness of the attack with 45 participants in a real-world environment on an Android tablet and an Android smartphone. For the tablet, we recover 61% of 200 4-digit PIN-codes within 20 attempts, even if the model is not trained with the victim's data. For the smartphone, we recover 9 words of size 7--13 letters with 50 attempts in a common side-channel attack benchmark. Our results suggest that it not always sufficient to rely on isolation mechanisms such as TrustZone to protect user input. We propose and discuss hardware, operating-system and application-level mechanisms to block this attack more effectively. Mobile devices may need a richer capability model, a more user-friendly notification system for sensor usage and a more thorough evaluation of the information leaked by the underlying hardware.

Peng Cheng, Ibrahim Ethem Bagci, Utz Roedig et al.

We report the first active acoustic side-channel attack. Speakers are used to emit human inaudible acoustic signals and the echo is recorded via microphones, turning the acoustic system of a smart phone into a sonar system. The echo signal can be used to profile user interaction with the device. For example, a victim's finger movements can be inferred to steal Android phone unlock patterns. In our empirical study, the number of candidate unlock patterns that an attacker must try to authenticate herself to a Samsung S4 Android phone can be reduced by up to 70% using this novel acoustic side-channel. Our approach can be easily applied to other application scenarios and device types. Overall, our work highlights a new family of security threats.