Yunho Lee, Journal of Internet Computing and Services, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 15-22, Jun. 2013
10.7472/jksii.2013.14.3.15, Full Text:
Keywords: Mobile Security, Secure Keypads, Personal Information, Keylogger

Abstract

Due to the widespread propagation of mobile platforms such as smartphones and tablets, financial and e-commercial transactions based on these mobile platforms are growing rapidly. Unlike PCs, almost all mobile platforms do not provide physical keyboards or mice but provide virtual keypads using touchscreens. For this reason, an attacker attempts to obtain the coordinates of touches on the virtual keypad in order to get actual key values. To tackle this vulnerability, financial applications for mobile platforms use secure keypads, which change position of each key displayed on the virtual keypad. However, these secure keypads cannot protect users' private information more securely than the virtual keypads because each key has only 2 or 3 positions and moreover its probability distribution is not uniform. In this paper, we analyze secure keypads used by the most financial mobile applications, point out the limitation of the previous research, and then propose a more general and accurate attack method on the secure keypads.

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