Your smartphone may not be as safe as you think. There are numerous ways that hackers can gain access to your private technology, according to a group of researchers working out of Syracuse University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science.

The five-person research group is led by Vir Phoha, an electrical engineering and computer science professor, and has been researching projects relating to smartphones and personal cyber security for several years.

In early November 2014, four members of the group published a paper, “Beware, Your Hands Reveal Your Secrets!” on the vulnerability of smartphone passwords. They also released a video showing how, while watching the back of someone’s phone while they type their PIN, the researchers were easily and accurately able to determine people’s PIN numbers using rudimentary technology that tracked the users’ hand movements. This weakness doesn’t just put phones at risk, Phoha said.

“We are creatures of habit; we tend to use the same passwords with small variations,” Phoha said. “This makes it very easy to guess a password.”

Thus, a hacker who can determine one PIN might be able to gain access to other private information such as bank accounts, credit cards and PIN-reliant door locks, Phoha said.

It’s the specific mission of Diksha Shukla, a doctoral student and member of the group, to find more of these vulnerabilities.

“My focus is mostly exploring how bad people can exploit weaknesses in current systems,” Shukla said.

Phoha and his team are also researching newer, alternative methods that can be used to verify, or “authenticate,” the identity of a device’s owner. These methods look at two different but interrelated things: the way you act and the way your brain works.

The study of “behavioral biometrics” is the study of how you act, said doctoral student and group member Rajesh Kumar. Kumar, who also collaborates with Shukla, is working on creating security systems that detect and use the unique way a person walks, talks and uses their phone to authenticate a phone owner’s identity.

“I’m also working on making this process continuous, not just at the first point of access,” Kumar said, explaining that his developing system would constantly keep track of a user’s mannerisms to be sure of their identity.

Another method of authenticating a user’s identity is by analyzing their brain waves, said Abdul Serwadda, a group member.

Serwadda has been collaborating with Leanne Hirshfield, an associate research professor of communications, to study how the signals in people’s brains react when they complete a task like a math quiz on a phone or other device. The goal is to craft a security system that will authenticate the identity of a device’s user by analyzing their unique brain patterns while they complete verification tasks like quizzes.

Serwadda and Hirschfield use a cutting-edge imaging technology called “functional near-infared spectroscopy” to detect signals from different parts of users’ brains. Though it gives a clear and hi-resolution view of a person’s brainwaves, the technology still requires people to wear a large, hat-like device on their heads in order to get those brain readings, Serwadda said.

This is the first time this technology is being used to verify people’s identities, Serwadda said. Eventually, it may even be used in personal smartphones.

“It will be a long time, but we think this will eventually be on the streets,” Serwadda said.

Phoha said he and his researchers are doing work on the frontier of their field.

“Our aim is to stay on the forefront of technology, and the best in our field,” Phoha said. “I would say that our group is very well recognized in the world.”

These are exciting times to be a researcher in the field, Phoha said.

“The technology is advancing super-exponentially,” Phoha said. “What happened in 70 years, from the late-19th century to the 1960s, the equivalent is happening every two or three years.”

The technologies that he and his team are developing may seem “futuristic” now, but may be in use in some form on the consumer market in as few as five years, Phoha said.

In the next 40 or 50 years, Phoha said he envisioned human bodies and technological devices functioning much more closely together.

Said Phoha: “I think that we are looking at a more efficient human model.”

Published on April 27, 2015 at 11:00 pm

Contact Thomas: tjbeckle@syr.edu