Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

12-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Computer and Information Science

Committee Chair

George Clark

Advisor(s)

J. Todd McDonald, Arie VandeWaa

Abstract

Computing side-channel research explores the manner in which physical emanations from systems can be used to reconstruct data. Acoustic side-channels are those physical emanations that produce a sonic frequency that is subsonic, supersonic, or considered in the range of human hearing [1]. Acoustic side-channel attacks (SCAs) are typically performed passively: a listening device captures aural frequencies from a machine via a microphone that are transmitted to the attacker for analysis [1]–[3]. Machine learning models have been presented to classify individual keystrokes according to variations in acoustic frequency [4]. Furthermore, the SonarSnoop framework presents a novel active approach that involves both generating and recording aural frequencies acting as a type of sonar system to record physical motion [5].

This research attempts to develop a supervised machine learning model to classify finger motion to collect login credentials typed on a laptop keyboard. The active acoustic side-channel has been used to track two-dimensional finger motion, but three-dimensional finger tracking using active acoustics is novel. The model as trained in this study incorrectly inferred labels on unseen data; however, we found and demonstrated that training with more samples per label may result in greater success during inference.

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