EyeSpot: Leveraging Gaze to Protect Private Text Content on Mobile Devices from Shoulder Surfing

Abstract

As mobile devices allow access to an increasing amount of private data, using them in public can potentially leak sensitive information through shoulder surfing. This includes personal private data (e.g., in chat conversations) and business-related content (e.g., in emails). Leaking the former might infringe on users’ privacy, while leaking the latter is considered a breach of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation as of May 2018. This creates a need for systems that protect sensitive data in public. We introduce EyeSpot, a technique that displays content through a spot that follows the user’s gaze while hiding the rest of the screen from an observer’s view through overlaid masks. We explore different configurations for EyeSpot in a user study in terms of users’ reading speed, text comprehension, and perceived workload. While our system is a proof of concept, we identify crystallized masks as a promising design candidate for further evaluation with regard to the security of the system in a shoulder surfing scenario.

The Role of Eye Gaze in Security and Privacy Applications: Survey and Future HCI Research Directions

“…Similar systems, like EyeSpot [77] and Private Reader [125], were proposed for privacy protection on mobile devices. In EyeSpot [77], the content that the user is gazing at is visible to them, while the rest is masked either by a black filter overlay, a crystallized mask, or fake content.…”

“…Similar systems, like EyeSpot [77] and Private Reader [125], were proposed for privacy protection on mobile devices. In EyeSpot [77], the content that the user is gazing at is visible to them, while the rest is masked either by a black filter overlay, a crystallized mask, or fake content. In the usability analysis of the different filter types, the authors found that the size of the visible spot impacts the reading speed significantly, and that the crystallized filter is more usable compared to the blackout one and fake text in terms of reading speed.…”

“…However, research done in this area so far is disconnected. Some works investigated how gaze can be used to inform which on-screen content to hide from shoulder surfers [19,77,125]. In these works, the presence of shoulder surfers was assumed.…”

Passquerade

“…Eiband et al distorted text messages using the user's handwriting, making it difficult for observers to read but not for legitmate users [5]. In EyeSpot [17], the phone's screen is distorted when texting or writing emails except for the area the user is gazing at. Crystallized masks were favored over blackout masks in EyeSpot because they maintained some contextual information (e.g., the user could still see who the last person to send a text message was), while still providing a relative protection from shoulder surfing.…”

“…Prior work experimented with a variety of filters to obfuscate content. The most promising ones were crystallize [17,28], mosaic (aka pixelate) [28], and Oil Paint [10,28]. The latter was shown in multiple works to be limited in terms of observation resistance [10,28].…”