Google Glass Steal Your Passcode

Researchers are refining the techniques of surreptitiously videoing people as they type in their passwords.

Other hackers have shown it's possible to perform automated over-the-shoulder password stealing. But Fu notes that older video tools had to actually see the display, which often is impossible from a distance or from indirect angles. (See UMass's PIN-capturing footage taken by Glass in the GIF below.) His team's video recognition software can spot passcodes even when the screen is unreadable, based on its understanding of an iPad's geometry and the position of the user's fingers. It maps its image of the angled iPad onto a "reference" image of the device, then looks for the abrupt down and up movements of the dark crescents that represent the fingers' shadows.