Researchers Used Sonar Signal from Smartphone Speaker to Steal Unlock Passwords

> “We expect iPhones are similarly vulnerable, but we only tested our attack on Androids,” Peng Cheng, a doctoral student at Lancaster University told me in an email.

Well, of course not. First of all, iPhones don't have unlock patterns. Which greatly diminishes the usefulness of this approach. Also, I don't believe iOS would allow continuous use of microphone and speaker when the screen is off. And it is incredibly hard to sideload applications on unsuspecting users.

>There are nearly 400,000 possible unlock patterns on the 3x3 swipe grid on Android phones, but prior research has demonstrated that 20 percent of people use one of 12 common patterns. While testing SonarSnoop, the researchers only focused on these dozen unlock combinations.

It seems to me that the effectiveness of this exploit comes more from the poor passwords most people use than any truly “earth shattering” security flaw in the technology.

Link to the original paper

https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.10250

I wonder if you could use the accelometers for something similar?

Made some practise runs with my iPhone and at least with this screen size the phone is moving when I try to mimick the unlock patterns with thumb.

Far easier is to just look at the smudge patterns on the screen.