Shoulder Surfers Get Faked Out with IllusionPIN App

Researchers have created a smartphone application to combat “shoulder-surfing”—when someone else looks over your shoulder as you enter your phone’s password or other private digits, potentially even gleaning vital financial or personal information...

Nasir Memon, a professor of computer science and engineering at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, explains that the technology, called “IllusionPIN,” deploys a hybrid-image keyboard that appears one way to the close-up user and differently to an observer at a distance of three feet or greater.

The research team simulated a series of shoulder-surfing attacks on smartphone devices to test the effectiveness of IllusionPIN at various distances.

In total, they performed 84 attempted shoulder-surfing attacks on 21 participants, none of which was successful. For contrast, they also mounted 21 shoulder-surfing attacks on unprotected phones using the same distance parameters; all 21 attacks were successful. more much more