smudge attack
/smʌdʒ əˈtæk/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.81 in modern English
22
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
2
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "Touch screens are touched, so oily residues, or smudges, remain on the screen as a side effect. Latent smudges may be usable to infer recently and frequently touched areas of the screen – a form of information leakage. This paper explores the feasibility of smudge attacks, where an attacker, by inspection of smudges, attempts to extract sensitive information about recent user input."
- "The OTP [one-time password] mechanism that financial institutions adopted utilizes a one-time password displayed on OTP device, so it is vulnerable to shoulder surfing attacks (SSA) and smudge attacks."
- "However, the fixed keypad lock can be easily unlocked by brute force attacks and the pattern lock is vulnerable to smudge attacks."
- "[A]rguably, picture passwords are a little more secure on desktops than on touchscreen devices, because you don't have to worry about anyone guessing your gesture password by examining your monitor for greasy fingerprints. That last scenario may sound like something out of a trashy espionage thriller, but the threat of a "smudge attack" is real enough to warrant serious study. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania coined the term in 2010 when they were able to successfully deduce gesture passwords used to unlock Android phones from smudge marks left on the screen."
Etymology
smudge + attack; coined in 2010 by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Computer and Information Science in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA: see the quotation.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /smʌdʒ əˈtæk/
- British English: /smʌdʒ əˈtæk/