A study presented at WOOT 10 – the 4th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies – warns that it's relatively straightforward to identify passwords from smudges on touchscreen mobile phones. 'Smudge Attacks on Smartphone Touch Screens' was presented by researchers from the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Their work shows that it's possible to partially or completely identify passwords – including the order in which characters are entered - by photographing smudged fingerprints on the screen of a touchscreen phone, even when an attempt has been made to clean the screen.
[PDF document]
[via Cellular-News.com]