Barometers Can Hear, and Sense Finger Taps
This reveals a novel privacy vulnerability in smartphones with ingress protection, posing a security risk for users by exploiting harmless sensor access.
The researchers tackled the problem of barometers in smartphones leaking sensitive information, showing that low-rate barometer samples can detect speaker activity with high accuracy (>=95%) and finger taps with 100% accuracy, including tap positions.
Most modern smartphones are equipped with a barometer to sample air pressure. Accessing these samples is deemed harmless, hence does not require any permission. In this work, we show, however, that these samples can reveal sensitive information in smartphones with ingress protection. For the first time, it is shown that barometer samples, even at a low rate of 25 Hz, can leak information about the smartphone's speaker activity. Specifically, we use these samples to detect with high accuracy (>= 95%) whether the smartphone's speaker is silent or playing a sound such as a ringtone. In addition, we use the samples to detect the activity of an external speaker. Finally, we show that low-rate barometer samples can be used to 1) detect touchscreen finger taps with 100% accuracy, and 2) gain information about the positions of finger taps.