Your Data is Leaking! An Empirical Study of User Habits during Smartphone Charging

Mobile devices especially smartphones have been widely adopted in people’s daily lives. Due to the convenience and computing capability, users are likely to store their private data on the phones, making them a target for cyber-criminals. With an increase of public charging stations, charging attacks have become a big threat on users’ private information. Juice filming charging (JFC) attack is a particular charging threat, which can infer users’ private information through automatically recording phone screen during the whole charging period. Due to the nature of monitoring phone screen, the actual effect of JFC attack depends heavily on users’ charging habits. However, this issue has not been widely investigated in the literature. Motivated by this, our work presents an empirical study to investigate how phone users may interact with their phones during the charging period. The study reveals that up to 97.1% participants would use their phones during the phone charging process (i.e., chatting with their friends), resulting in an unneglectable issue of privacy leakage in practice.