Mobile phones contain an array of powerful sensors. While access to many of the most obvious sources of information is generally restricted, the use of a number of a number of other seemingly innocuous sensors is not. In this paper, we demonstrate that unfettered access to accelerometer data allows a malicious application to recover and decode the vibrations caused by keypresses on a nearby keyboard. By characterizing consecutive pairs of keypress events, we demonstrate the ability to recover as much as 80% of typed content.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~traynor/papers/traynor-ccs11.pdf
