DukeOfGood - Slashdot User

Comment They can also... (Score 1) 42

by DukeOfGood on Tuesday February 20, 2024 @08:43PM (#64255954) Attached to: Fingerprints Can Be Recreated From the Sounds Made When Swiping On a Touchscreen

I read that they can also recreate a computer monitor from a van outside by listening to teh frequencies. Smart meters "aren't", but CAN, deduce what appliances are on/off from the way they draw power. Latest wifi routers can 'see' around a room like bats do.

Submission + - Fingerprints Can Be Recreated From the Sounds Made When You Swipe On Touchscreen (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20, 2024 @05:26PM

An anonymous reader writes: An interesting new attack on biometric security has been outlined by a group of researchers from China and the US. PrintListener: Uncovering the Vulnerability of Fingerprint Authentication via the Finger Friction Sound [PDF] proposes a side-channel attack on the sophisticated Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). The attack leverages the sound characteristics of a user’s finger swiping on a touchscreen to extract fingerprint pattern features. Following tests, the researchers assert that they can successfully attack “up to 27.9% of partial fingerprints and 9.3% of complete fingerprints within five attempts at the highest security FAR [False Acceptance Rate] setting of 0.01%.” This is claimed to be the first work that leverages swiping sounds to infer fingerprint information.

Without contact prints or finger detail photos, how can an attacker hope to get any fingerprint data to enhance MasterPrint and DeepMasterPrint dictionary attack results on user fingerprints? One answer is as follows: the PrintListener paper says that “finger-swiping friction sounds can be captured by attackers online with a high possibility.” The source of the finger-swiping sounds can be popular apps like Discord, Skype, WeChat, FaceTime, etc. Any chatty app where users carelessly perform swiping actions on the screen while the device mic is live. Hence the side-channel attack name – PrintListener. [...]

To prove the theory, the scientists practically developed their attack research as PrintListener. In brief, PrintListener uses a series of algorithms for pre-processing the raw audio signals which are then used to generate targeted synthetics for PatternMasterPrint (the MasterPrint generated by fingerprints with a specific pattern). Importantly, PrintListener went through extensive experiments “in real-world scenarios,” and, as mentioned in the intro, can facilitate successful partial fingerprint attacks in better than one in four cases, and complete fingerprint attacks in nearly one in ten cases. These results far exceed unaided MasterPrint fingerprint dictionary attacks.

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