Inferring Mobile Payment Passcodes Leveraging Wearable Devices

Mobile payment has drawn considerable attention due to its convenience of paying via personal mobile devices at anytime and anywhere, and passcodes (i.e., PINs) are the first choice of most consumers to authorize the payment. This work demonstrates a serious security breach and aims to raise the awareness of the public that the passcodes for authorizing transactions in mobile payments can be leaked by exploiting the embedded sensors in wearable devices (e.g., smartwatches). We present a passcode inference system, which examines to what extent the user's PIN during mobile payment could be revealed from a single wrist-worn wearable device under different input scenarios involving either two hands or a single hand. Extensive experiments with 15 volunteers demonstrate that an adversary is able to recover a user's PIN with high success rate within 5 tries under various input scenarios

Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition in tumor microenvironment

The epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) plays crucial roles in the formation of the body plan and also in the tumor invasion process. In addition, EMT also causes disruption of cell-cell adherence, loss of apico-basal polarity, matrix remodeling, increased motility and invasiveness in promoting tumor metastasis. The tumor microenvironment plays an important role in facilitating cancer metastasis and may induce the occurrence of EMT in tumor cells. A large number of inflammatory cells infiltrating the tumor site, as well as hypoxia existing in a large area of tumor, in addition many stem cells present in tumor microenvironment, such as cancer stem cells (CSCs), mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), all of these may be the inducers of EMT in tumor cells. The signaling pathways involved in EMT are various, including TGF-β, NF-κB, Wnt, Notch, and others. In this review, we discuss the current knowledge about the role of the tumor microenvironment in EMT and the related signaling pathways as well as the interaction between them

Towards In-baggage Suspicious Object Detection Using Commodity WiFi

The growing needs of public safety urgently require scalable and low-cost techniques on detecting dangerous objects (e.g., lethal weapons, homemade-bombs, explosive chemicals) hidden in baggage. Traditional baggage check involves either high manpower for manual examinations or expensive and specialized instruments, such as X-ray and CT. As such, many public places (i.e., museums and schools) that lack of strict security check are exposed to high risk. In this work, we propose to utilize the fine-grained channel state information (CSI) from off-the-shelf WiFi to detect suspicious objects that are suspected to be dangerous (i.e., defined as any metal and liquid object) without penetrating into the user's privacy through physically opening the baggage. Our suspicious object detection system significantly reduces the deployment cost and is easy to set up in public venues. Towards this end, our system is realized by two major components: it first detects the existence of suspicious objects and identifies the dangerous material type based on the reconstructed CSI complex value (including both amplitude and phase information); it then determines the risk level of the object by examining the object's dimension (i.e., liquid volume and metal object's shape) based on the reconstructed CSI complex of the signals reflected by the object. Extensive experiments are conducted with 15 metal and liquid objects and 6 types of bags in a 6-month period. The results show that our system can detect over 95% suspicious objects in different types of bags and successfully identify 90% dangerous material types. In addition, our system can achieve the average errors of 16ml and 0.5cm when estimating the volume of liquid and shape (i.e., width and height) of metal objects, respectively

WristSpy: Snooping Passcodes in Mobile Payment Using Wrist-worn Wearables

Mobile payment has drawn considerable attention due to its convenience of paying via personal mobile devices at anytime and anywhere, and passcodes (i.e., PINs or patterns) are the first choice of most consumers to authorize the payment. This paper demonstrates a serious security breach and aims to raise the awareness of the public that the passcodes for authorizing transactions in mobile payments can be leaked by exploiting the embedded sensors in wearable devices (e.g., smartwatches). We present a passcode inference system, WristSpy, which examines to what extent the user's PIN/pattern during the mobile payment could be revealed from a single wrist-worn wearable device under different passcode input scenarios involving either two hands or a single hand. In particular, WristSpy has the capability to accurately reconstruct fine-grained hand movement trajectories and infer PINs/patterns when mobile and wearable devices are on two hands through building a Euclidean distance-based model and developing a training-free parallel PIN/pattern inference algorithm. When both devices are on the same single hand, a highly challenging case, WristSpy extracts multi-dimensional features by capturing the dynamics of minute hand vibrations and performs machine-learning based classification to identify PIN entries. Extensive experiments with 15 volunteers and 1600 passcode inputs demonstrate that an adversary is able to recover a user's PIN/pattern with up to 92% success rate within 5 tries under various input scenarios