In a world where security is paramount, the ability to protect personal information is constantly evolving. At SBASSE, a team of talented computer science researchers has uncovered a vulnerability in smartphone technology that could change the way we think about privacy.
The paper, "Glitch in Time: Exploiting Temporal Misalignment of IMU for Eavesdropping," has just been accepted to AsiaCCS 2025 (Core Rank A), a prestigious conference in the field of cybersecurity. With a competitive acceptance rate of only 15% in Cycle 1, this marks a significant achievement for the team, composed of Dr. Naveed Anwar Bhatti, Ahmed Najeeb, Abdul Rafay, and Dr. Muhammad Hamad Alizai.
What began as a simple class project for CS 677 in 2023 quickly turned into a journey of discovery. Ahmed and Abdul, both passionate about technology, set out to replicate existing research aimed at reconstructing audio from mobile accelerometer data. Their breakthrough came when they introduced a clever twist—misaligning the timing between the smartphone’s gyroscope and accelerometer. This allowed the gyroscope data to enhance the accelerometer data, making it possible to reconstruct voice commands at a lower sampling rate, all without requiring user permissions.
This discovery has profound implications for smartphone security. The ability to "listen" to your voice assistant commands without consent—using just two sensors at a sampling rate as low as 200 Hz—poses a major privacy risk. The vulnerability comes from the fact that these sensors don’t require user permission to operate at low rates, making them an ideal target for exploitation.
After months of hard work, the project blossomed into a senior-year SProj and was submitted to AsiaCCS 2025 in August 2024. The team's work has now earned them a place in one of the world’s top cybersecurity forums, where their research will undoubtedly inspire further innovations.
Dr. Naveed shares his pride, saying, “We can’t help but feel proud of Ahmed and Abdul, who poured their heart and soul into this project.”
Ahmed, now pursuing his PhD at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and Abdul Rafay, who is continuing his academic journey as a Teaching Fellow in CS at LUMS, have “both proven that with dedication and creativity, the boundaries of what is possible in technology can be pushed even further.”
Congratulations to the team on their groundbreaking success!
