[2512.11484] Capacitive Touchscreens at Risk: Recovering Handwritten Trajectory on Smartphone via Electromagnetic Emanations

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arXiv:2512.11484 (cs)

[Submitted on 12 Dec 2025]

Title:Capacitive Touchscreens at Risk: Recovering Handwritten Trajectory on Smartphone via Electromagnetic Emanations

Authors:Yukun Cheng, Shiyu Zhu, Changhai Ou, Xingshuo Han, Yuan Li, Shihui Zheng<br>View a PDF of the paper titled Capacitive Touchscreens at Risk: Recovering Handwritten Trajectory on Smartphone via Electromagnetic Emanations, by Yukun Cheng and 4 other authors

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Abstract:This paper reveals and exploits a critical security vulnerability: the electromagnetic (EM) side channel of capacitive touchscreens leaks sufficient information to recover fine-grained, continuous handwriting trajectories. We present Touchscreen Electromagnetic Side-channel Leakage Attack (TESLA), a non-contact attack framework that captures EM signals generated during on-screen writing and regresses them into two-dimensional (2D) handwriting trajectories in real time. Extensive evaluations across a variety of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) smartphones show that TESLA achieves 77% character recognition accuracy and a Jaccard index of 0.74, demonstrating its capability to recover highly recognizable motion trajectories that closely resemble the original handwriting under realistic attack conditions.

Subjects:

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2512.11484 [cs.CR]

(or<br>arXiv:2512.11484v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.11484

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Related DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1145/3770743.3803951

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DOI(s) linking to related resources

Submission history<br>From: Cheng Yukun [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Fri, 12 Dec 2025 11:33:05 UTC (823 KB)

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View a PDF of the paper titled Capacitive Touchscreens at Risk: Recovering Handwritten Trajectory on Smartphone via Electromagnetic Emanations, by Yukun Cheng and 4 other authors<br>View PDF<br>HTML (experimental)<br>TeX Source

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