Thermal cameras can reveal heat traces on user interfaces, such as keyboards. This can be exploited maliciously to infer sensitive input, such as passwords. While previous work considered thermal attacks that rely on visual inspection of simple image processing techniques, we show that attackers can perform more effective AI-driven attacks. We demonstrate this by presenting the development of ThermoSecure, and its evaluation in two user studies (N=21, N=16) which reveal novel insights about thermal attacks. We detail the implementation of ThermoSecure and make a dataset of 1,500 thermal images of keyboards with heat traces resulting from input publicly available. Our first study shows that ThermoSecure successfully attacks 6-symbol, 8-symbol, 12-symbol, and 16-symbol passwords with an average accuracy of 92%, 80%, 71%, and 55% respectively, and even higher accuracy when thermal images are taken within 30 seconds. We found that typing behavior significantly impacts vulnerability to thermal attacks, where hunt-and-peck typists are more vulnerable than fast typists (92% vs 83% thermal attack success if performed within 30 seconds). The second study showed that the keycaps material has a statistically significant effect on the effectiveness of thermal attacks: ABS keycaps retain the thermal trace of users presses for a longer period of time, making them more vulnerable to thermal attacks, with a 52% average attack accuracy compared to 14% for keyboards with PBT keycaps. Finally, we discuss how systems can leverage our results to protect from thermal attacks, and present 7 mitigation approaches that are based on our results and previous work.

Saudi English has recently emerged as a new variety within the World Englishes framework. Many scholars have argued that there is still a gap in the literature and more studies on Saudi English are needed. This study hopes to contribute to the growing research interest in Saudi English studies. The current study aims to identify Saudi English syntactic characteristics classified in relation to noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase, and clausal structure. Data were collected using three methods: conversation in natural settings, open-ended questions, and students' writings. The findings confirm that substrate-superstrate interaction affects many syntactic characteristics of Saudi English.

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