It’s a pattern that no doubt repeats itself daily in hundreds of millions of offices around the world: People sit down, turn on their computers, set their mobile phones on their desks, and begin to work. What if a hacker could use that phone to track what the person was typing on the keyboard just inches away?

A research team at Georgia Tech has discovered how to do exactly that, using a smart phone accelerometer—the internal device that detects when and how the phone is tilted—to sense keyboard vibrations and decipher complete sentences with up to 80-percent accuracy. The procedure is not easy, the team says, but is definitely possible with the latest generations of smart phones.

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