Smatphone is playing an indispensable part in people’s daily life. “My Nexus One is like clothes to me without which, I feel like a fish out of water”, said Frank jokingly. We can see how important a Smatphone is, if a little exaggerated. Like most of users, Frank uses a PIN code by by drawing patterns, however, couples of weeks ago, he read a piece of news and learned that the password could be attained eaisly by the so-called dreaded “Smudge Attack”. “It really shocked me, I’ve never thought about that before,” said Frank with raised eyebrows.

In fact, the Smudget Attack is a scientific method investigated by American researchers about two years ago, it was basically used to discern the assword pattern of a touchscreen devices such as smart phones, tablet computers and more. Generally, the Smudget Attack relies largely on the oily smudget left on the devices, for example, using the smart phone while eating a hamburger or fried chicken, naturally, the oil of the food will remain on the screen of the devices. Holding the smart phone up to the sufficient light, the finger grease can be seen easily and clearly, even more frighteningly, the input pattern or PIN code can be figured out by careful observation, with the chances of success up to 90% under the proper condition. When comes to the Android phones, this is particularly obvious. “We showed that in many situations full or partial pattern recovery is possible, even with smudge ‘noise’ from simulated application usage or distortion caused by incidental clothing contact.”, said Henderson, a researcher of The University of Pennsylvania. However, users don’t need to worry about this too much since the the premise of using Smudge Attack by an attacker is to access your smart phone first. It’s suggested to use a PIN code rather than drawing a pattern, so as to reduce the chance of presenting a threat to the Smudge Attack, but, it is not 100% safe with potential risk still exsits depending on the strength of the PIN code as well as the cleanliness of the screen. “It is a very easy and practical way to prevent your smart phone from the Smudget Attack by cleaning the screen after using.” Henderson said.

On the other hand, in order to mitigate the Smudget Attack, it is recommended to install an application called WhisperCore onto the smart phone. It is a security app specailly designed to tackle the Smudget Attack problem by reminding users wipe the smudges off the phones. After using the smart phone, WhisperCore will show a pattern with all of the numbers in a vertical column, forcing users to swipe downward once the correct pin has been entered. If they don’t like to use a pin-code unlock, after the correct pattern has been input, the Smudget Attack will present users a screen which’s full of stars, they can enter the homescreen of the smart phone unless ecch of the highlighted star has been swiped, the final result is that: the unlock pattern cannot be seen at all. Besides, this app can also encrypts the data partition at with an option to encrypt the contents of your SD card.

So far, the WhisperCore is for free and only available for Nexus One and the Nexus S, but it’s said that it would support much more smart phones and other devices in the coming future.