Tao Ni (City University of Hong Kong), Yuefeng Du (City University of Hong Kong), Qingchuan Zhao (City University of Hong Kong), Cong Wang (City University of Hong Kong)

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies are increasingly employed in numerous applications across various areas. Therefore, it is essential to ensure the security of interactions between users and VR devices. In this paper, we disclose a new side-channel leakage in the constellation tracking system of mainstream VR platforms, where the infrared (IR) signals emitted from the VR controllers for controller-headset interactions can be maliciously exploited to reconstruct unconstrained input keystrokes on the virtual keyboard non-intrusively. We propose a novel keystroke inference attack named VRecKey to demonstrate the feasibility and practicality of this novel infrared side channel. Specifically, VRecKey leverages a customized 2D IR sensor array to intercept ambient IR signals emitted from VR controllers and subsequently infers (i) character-level key presses on the virtual keyboard and (ii) word-level keystrokes along with their typing trajectories. We extensively evaluate the effectiveness of VRecKey with two commercial VR devices, and the results indicate that it can achieve over 94.2% and 90.5% top-3 accuracy in inferring character-level and word-level keystrokes with varying lengths, respectively. In addition, empirical results show that VRecKey is resilient to several practical impact factors and presents effectiveness in various real-world scenarios, which provides a complementary and orthogonal attack surface for the exploration of keystroke inference attacks in VR platforms.

View More Papers

TWINFUZZ: Differential Testing of Video Hardware Acceleration Stacks

Matteo Leonelli (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Addison Crump (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Meng Wang (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Florian Bauckholt (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Keno Hassler (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Ali Abbasi (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Thorsten Holz (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information…

Read More

How Different Tokenization Algorithms Impact LLMs and Transformer Models...

Ahmed Mostafa, Raisul Arefin Nahid, Samuel Mulder (Auburn University)

Read More

SCRUTINIZER: Towards Secure Forensics on Compromised TrustZone

Yiming Zhang (Southern University of Science and Technology and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Fengwei Zhang (Southern University of Science and Technology), Xiapu Luo (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Rui Hou (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Xuhua Ding (Singapore Management University), Zhenkai Liang (National University of Singapore), Shoumeng Yan (Ant Group), Tao…

Read More

Balancing Privacy and Data Utilization: A Comparative Vignette Study...

Leona Lassak (Ruhr University Bochum), Hanna Püschel (TU Dortmund University), Oliver D. Reithmaier (Leibniz University Hannover), Tobias Gostomzyk (TU Dortmund University), Markus Dürmuth (Leibniz University Hannover)

Read More