University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) researchers have developed simple but effective techniques to prevent sophisticated malware from secretly attacking smartphones. The Tap-Wave-Rub (TWR) methods — tapping, waving a hand over or rubbing the phone’s proximity sensor — are being presented at the 6th Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec‘13) April 17-19, 2013, in Hungary, Budapest.

The designers say the TWR system will turn the phone’s weakest security component, the user, into its strongest defender.