PowerTouch: A Security Objective-Guided Automation Framework for Generating Wired Ghost Touch Attacks on Touchscreens

The wired ghost touch attacks are the emerging and severe threats against modern touchscreens. The attackers can make touchscreens falsely report nonexistent touches (i.e., ghost touches) by injecting common-mode noise (CMN) into the target devices via power cables. Existing attacks rely on reverse-...

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Veröffentlicht in:2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference On Computer Aided Design (ICCAD) S. 1 - 9
Hauptverfasser: Zhu, Huifeng, Yu, Zhiyuan, Cao, Weidong, Zhang, Ning, Zhang, Xuan
Format: Tagungsbericht
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: ACM 29.10.2022
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ISSN:1558-2434
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Abstract The wired ghost touch attacks are the emerging and severe threats against modern touchscreens. The attackers can make touchscreens falsely report nonexistent touches (i.e., ghost touches) by injecting common-mode noise (CMN) into the target devices via power cables. Existing attacks rely on reverse-engineering the touchscreens, then manually crafting the CMN waveforms to control the types and locations of ghost touches. Although successful, they are limited in practicality and attack capability due to the touchscreens' black-box nature and the immense search space of attack parameters. To overcome the above limitations, this paper presents PowerTouch, a framework that can automatically generate wired ghost touch attacks. We adopt a software-hardware co-design approach and propose a domain-specific genetic algorithm-based method that is tailored to account for the characteristics of the CMN waveform. Based on the security objectives, our framework automatically optimizes the CMN waveform towards injecting the desired type of ghost touches into regions specified by attackers. The effectiveness of PowerTouch is demonstrated by successfully launching attacks on touchscreen devices from two different brands given nine different objectives. Compared with the state-of-the-art attack, we seminally achieve controlling taps on an extra dimension and injecting swipes on both dimensions. We can place an average of 84.2% taps on the targeted side of the screen, with the location error in the other dimension no more than 1.53mm. An average of 94.5% of injected swipes with correct directions is also achieved. The quantitative comparison with the state-of-the-art method shows that a better attack performance can be achieved by PowerTouch.
AbstractList The wired ghost touch attacks are the emerging and severe threats against modern touchscreens. The attackers can make touchscreens falsely report nonexistent touches (i.e., ghost touches) by injecting common-mode noise (CMN) into the target devices via power cables. Existing attacks rely on reverse-engineering the touchscreens, then manually crafting the CMN waveforms to control the types and locations of ghost touches. Although successful, they are limited in practicality and attack capability due to the touchscreens' black-box nature and the immense search space of attack parameters. To overcome the above limitations, this paper presents PowerTouch, a framework that can automatically generate wired ghost touch attacks. We adopt a software-hardware co-design approach and propose a domain-specific genetic algorithm-based method that is tailored to account for the characteristics of the CMN waveform. Based on the security objectives, our framework automatically optimizes the CMN waveform towards injecting the desired type of ghost touches into regions specified by attackers. The effectiveness of PowerTouch is demonstrated by successfully launching attacks on touchscreen devices from two different brands given nine different objectives. Compared with the state-of-the-art attack, we seminally achieve controlling taps on an extra dimension and injecting swipes on both dimensions. We can place an average of 84.2% taps on the targeted side of the screen, with the location error in the other dimension no more than 1.53mm. An average of 94.5% of injected swipes with correct directions is also achieved. The quantitative comparison with the state-of-the-art method shows that a better attack performance can be achieved by PowerTouch.
Author Yu, Zhiyuan
Zhu, Huifeng
Zhang, Xuan
Cao, Weidong
Zhang, Ning
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  givenname: Xuan
  surname: Zhang
  fullname: Zhang, Xuan
  organization: Washington University in St.Louis,MO,USA
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Snippet The wired ghost touch attacks are the emerging and severe threats against modern touchscreens. The attackers can make touchscreens falsely report nonexistent...
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SubjectTerms Aerospace electronics
Automation
Closed box
Design automation
Power cables
Touch sensitive screens
Title PowerTouch: A Security Objective-Guided Automation Framework for Generating Wired Ghost Touch Attacks on Touchscreens
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