Title: A survey on screenlogger attacks as well as countermeasures

Authors: Hugo Sbai; Jassim Happa; Michael Goldsmith; Samy Meftali

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Oxford University, 15 Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3QD, UK ' Department of Computer Science, Oxford University, 15 Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3QD, UK ' Department of Computer Science, Oxford University, 15 Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3QD, UK ' Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique (Cristal), Université de Lille 1, Bâtiment M3 extension Avenue Carl Gauss, 59655 Villeneuve-d'Ascq Cedex, France

Abstract: Keyloggers and screenloggers are one of the active growing threats to user's confidentiality as they can run in user-space, easily be distributed and upload information to remote servers. They use a wide number of different technologies and may be implemented in many ways. Keyloggers and screenloggers are very largely diverted from their primary and legitimate function to be exploited for malicious purposes compromising the privacy of users, and bank customers notably. Due to the recent multiplication of mobile devices with a touchscreen, the screenlogger threat has become even more dangerous. This threat is even harder to fight given the limited resources of the affected devices. This paper is the first step of a project aiming at proposing efficient countermeasures against screenloggers. It provides a complete overview of the different techniques used by this malware and discusses an extensive set of plausible counter measures.

Keywords: screenlogger; virtual keyboard; noise; screenshot; malware detection; OCR; shoulder surfing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2020.107643

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2020 Vol.12 No.4, pp.441 - 452

Received: 04 Jan 2019
Accepted: 02 Jun 2019
Published online: 03 Jun 2020 *

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