Text Prediction Feature In Smartphones Expose Users Wallet Recovery Phrase

[Mic Drop]

According to a recent reddit post on the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit, hackers could potentially use the text prediction feature of smartphones to drain a user’s funds. Reddit user Andre, a 33-year-old IT professional from Germany, made the post after discovering his mobile phone’s ability to predict the entire recovery seed phrase as soon as he typed down the first word out of the BIP 39 list.

According to the report, Andre had experimented with different keyboard software in order to find out the degree to which each software was able to predict the seed phrase correctly.

His tests revealed that Google's GBoard was the least vulnerable, as the software did not correctly guess every phrase. Microsoft's Swiftkey keyboard, on the other hand, was able to guess the seed phrase right away. The Samsung keyboard could also predict the words if “Auto replace” and “Suggest text corrections” have been manually turned on.

Andre suggested that users can protect themselves from this vulnerability by regularly clearing the predictive type cache from their devices.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/warning-smartphone-text-prediction-guesses-crypto-hodler-s-seed-phrase