Expelliarmus: Command Cancellation Attacks on Smartphones using Electromagnetic Interference

Human-machine interactions (HMIs), e.g., touchscreens, are essential for users to interact with mobile devices. They are also beneficial in resisting emerging active attacks, which aim at maliciously controlling mobile devices, e.g., smartphones and tablets. With touchscreen-like HMIs, users can notice and interrupt malicious actions conducted by the attackers timely and perform necessary countermeasures, e.g., tapping the ‘Quit’ button on the touchscreen. However, the effect of HMI-oriented active attacks has not been investigated yet. In this paper, we present a practical attack towards touch-based devices, namely Expelliarmus. It reveals a new attack surface of active attacks for hijacking users’ operations and thus taking full control over victim devices. Expelliarmus neutralizes users’ touch commands by producing a reverse current via electromagnetic interference (EMI). Since the reverse current offsets the current change caused by a touch, the touchscreen detects no current change and thus ignores users’ commands. Besides this basic denial-of-service attack, we also realize a target cancellation attack, which can neutralize target commands, e.g., ‘Quit’ without interference in irrelevant operations. Thus, the active attack can be completely performed without interruption from users, even if they are alerted by the abnormal events. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of Expelliarmus on 29 off-the-shelf devices.