Our phone batteries have enough artificial intelligence to monitor our phone usage. HackRead says this enables them to “employ power-saving technologies that result in longer battery life.” So far so good, but what if a hacker extended their primitive brains. Could our smartphone batteries read our minds and learn how we tick?
Inference Attacks by Malicious Batteries on Mobile Devices
Authors Pavel Lifshits, Roni Forte ,Yedid Hoshen, Matt Halpern, Manuel Philipose, Mohit Tiwari, and Mark Silberstein published a paper in De Gruyter Open. They titled it ‘Power to Peep-All: Inference Attacks by Malicious Batteries on Mobile Devices.’
In it, they describe a “smart battery that includes storage and processing elements to stealthily monitor and report user activity, in addition to their benign power management functions.” They believe such a hack would be easy to implement. All hackers need do is sell malicious batteries at bargain prices promising longer lives. We note the innocent version of this is already alive and well on the web.
What Could Happen If Our Phone Batteries Read Our Minds
Such a hacked battery could continuously observe our phone behavior. The hacker would then know much time we spend on the internet, compared to typing or receiving phone calls. If they placed a dynamic random-access-memory power tracer inside, they could also read our keystrokes.
A graphics-processing unit could also reveal the websites we visit by matching power flows to particular keystrokes. However, how practical is this really? The authors of the report were able to detect visited websites with 65% accuracy. Notwithstanding, they advise we could avoid all this if we sourced our smartphone batteries from trusted sources.
Nonetheless, as HackRead comments, “it’s a significant study because it shows what is possible, and details how much information hackers could get through continuous monitoring” if phone batteries read our minds.
Related
The Stressful Life of Smartphone Batteries
Facts About Li-ion Batteries’ Calendar and Cycle Life
Preview Image: IPhone 8 – Could a Hacker Read the Keystrokes?
