MacBook IMU side channel leaks keystrokes with up to 97.5% accuracy
chaumian · x · 2026-09-21
An arXiv paper unveils BRUTUS, the first unprivileged side-channel attack against the built-in IMU sensors in Apple MacBooks, readable without root via an IOKit driver. It recovers keystrokes at 89.1–97.5% character accuracy, reconstructs some sentences with 100% accuracy using language models, and profiles users and desk surfaces without labels. HIDIdleTime and CGEventSource metadata interfaces amplify the leakage.
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