Security threats to mobile multimedia applications: Camera-based attacks on mobile phones

Today's mobile smartphones are very powerful, and many smartphone applications use wireless multimedia communications. Mobile phone security has become an important aspect of security issues in wireless multimedia communications. As the most popular mobile operating system, Android security has been extensively studied by researchers. However, few works have studied mobile phone multimedia security. In this article, we focus on security issues related to mobile phone cameras. Specifically, we discover several new attacks that are based on the use of phone cameras. We implement the attacks on real phones, and demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the attacks. Furthermore, we propose a lightweight defense scheme that can effectively detect these attacks.