Smartphone motion sensors can be used to ID phone users

A smartphone’s accelerometers the bit that changes the orientation of the screen as it’s flipped, or what makes it possible to play Angry Birds or Temple Run on your mobile device. But Stanford researcher Hristo Bojinov has discovered that a smartphone’s accelerometer can be used to identify that smartphone, and it’s user.

Every accelerometer has individual defects that make it distinct from other accelerometers. These defects don’t affect the functions of the phone, but mean that the numbers generated when that specific phone is moves or stands still will be unique to that phone. In short, these unique defects mean that the phone and its user can be isolated.

Bojinov found that a simple program that could measure accelerometer defects and come up with a “fingerprint” for the phone. When specific users working with Bojinov visited a website, Bojinov’s program within the page recorded the responses of the accelerometers.

 Accelerometer of a smartphone
While it comes as no surprise that there are ways to trace your smartphone, this method is different because there is no way to counteract it — it is literally built into the hardware of the phone. Bojinov’s program could be built invisibly into any website that your smartphone might access, and there is absolutely no way to know if your accelerometer and phone have been identified this way. Absolutely anybody could write this program into a website and begin tracking your phone, and there is nothing that we can currently do to stop it.

There have been several advances in recent years in the field of software security, but Bojinov’s research highlights the fact that privacy is fast becoming a rarity in the Information Age. Bojinov’s complete findings will be published sometime in the upcoming months, and will hopefully make developers of smartphone technology redouble their efforts to ensure user privacy.

Source Discovery.com