The Battery and App can be Used To steal Data From Your Smartphone, Claims Research

A new case steady revealed that your mobile phone battery, as well as the screen, could be turned into a secret surveillance tool to observe and steal your data. According to the research work published in the DE GRUYTER OPEN, A malicious battery may serve as a powerful platform for attacks on user’s privacy. 

A researcher clarifies in their research work on how malicious batteries in smartphones could be used to read your data just by analyzing the battery energy levels. Using apps, the user can keep watch power consumption to increase the life of the battery, by managing the resources and improve the responsiveness of a gadget. The battery status API links both software and hardware by creating a communication channel. In the background, such API can be stealing information and send toward the attacker without the user’s acknowledgment. These types of “Attack” can occur by replacing the battery of a target smartphone with a compromised one. The data collected with the help of micro-controller and Battery Status API could be analyzed using Acquisition Interface to match power flows with specific keystrokes and pinpoint the characters typed on the keyboard. Using this method hackers can – detect all the incoming calls on that device, capture keystroke, observes web browsing history.

The following hardware and software were used for research purpose.

Mobile Device	Huawei Mate 9	Samsung Galaxy Note 4	Samsung Galaxy S4
Chipset	Hisil. Kirin 960	Snapdragon 805	Snapdragon 600
CPU	CPU Cortex-A73 & Cortex-A53	Cortex-A57 & Cortex-A53	Krait 300
Display	5.9’	5.7’	5.0’
OS	OS 7.0 (Nougat)	5.1.1 (Lollipop)	4.4.2 (KitKat)
Browser	Chrome 53	Native 6.2 / Chrome 63	Native 2.1 / Chrome 43
Battery	Li-Po 4000mAh	Li-Ion 3220mAh	Li-Ion 2600mAh

In another research done by computer science academics at Northeastern University, more than 17000 apps were stealing information in the background by collecting data and share to the third party without user acknowledgement. You may have noticed that today you are talking about to purchase of Nike shoes and very next day you face advertisement in your email regarding Nike shoes. How’s it possible? Yeah, there are some apps on android those keeps watch and listen whatever being done by you. The research was done on more than 17,000 apps using the automated program that kept watch the incoming and outgoing flow of data. As a result over 8000 apps were found for sending data. In the year 2016, a mass communication professor at the University of South Florida Kelli Burns alleged that company is kept listening to their conversation and that was used to show related advertisement in his news feed. But later social media giant Facebook dismissed the allegations.