[HN Gopher] EarSpy: Spying on Phone Calls via Ear Speaker Vibrat...
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EarSpy: Spying on Phone Calls via Ear Speaker Vibrations
Author : simonpure
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-12-28 14:27 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.securityweek.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.securityweek.com)
| anyfactor wrote:
| This reminds of how Helen Keller learned to communicate. The
| technique is called Tadoma[0].
|
| > Tadoma is a method of communication used by deafblind
| individuals, in which the deafblind person places their little
| finger on the speaker's lips and their fingers along the jawline.
| The middle three fingers often fall along the speaker's cheeks
| with the little finger picking up the vibrations of the speaker's
| throat.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadoma
| 95014_refugee wrote:
| This is (very) old news, and responsible vendors have had
| mitigations in place for a long time now.
| hackernewds wrote:
| > In the gender recognition test, whose goal is to determine
| whether the target is male or female, the EarSpy attack had a 98%
| accuracy. The accuracy was nearly as high, at 92%, for detecting
| the speaker's identity.
|
| When it comes to actual speech, the accuracy was up to 56% for
| capturing digits spoken in a phone call.
|
| "[This] accuracy still exhibits five times greater accuracy than
| a random guess, which implies that vibration due to the ear
| speaker induced a reasonable amount of distinguishable impact on
| accelerometer data," the researchers said.
|
| this seems not to have any practical significance. and
| recognizing numbers (only 56%) of the time is practically still
| as good as guessing, and not useful, in the context of spying,
| without the spoken words
| dannyw wrote:
| Some OTP codes can be sent via phone calls, and keep in mind
| this is just a research prototype. It's certainly plausible
| that improvements can result in higher accuracy.
| messe wrote:
| > this seems not to have any practical significance. and
| recognizing numbers (only 56%) of the time is practically still
| as good as guessing, and not useful, in the context of spying,
| without the spoken words
|
| If that accuracy is at the single digit level, then it's
| significantly better than guessing, which would yield a 10%
| accuracy. 56% would be good enough to capture a 4-digit OTP
| code more than 1/8 of the time.
| codeddesign wrote:
| "whether the target is male or female, the EarSpy attack had a
| 98% accuracy"
|
| I guess the other 2% are "gender neutral".
| anfractuosity wrote:
| I came across this paper recently 'mmSpy: Spying Phone Calls
| using mmWave Radars' which says 'mmSpy performs sensing of
| earpiece vibrations using an off-the-shelf radar device that
| operates in the mmWave spectrum (77 GHz, and 60 GHz).'
|
| There's a video with some audio samples here -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuuXAfIYo04
|
| The Ti dev boards are around ~PS200 if I recall correctly.
| 0ct4via wrote:
| Link to the paper, since you didn't provide one...
|
| https://www.cse.psu.edu/~mkg31/papers/mmSpy.pdf
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| If you find this interesting, you may also like some of Mordechai
| Guri's work: https://cyber.bgu.ac.il/advanced-cyber/airgap
| dessant wrote:
| It's worrying that any website can access real-time data from
| sensors by default in Android browsers, and there is no option to
| deny access to these APIs in Firefox for Android and Samsung
| Internet.
|
| https://sensor-js.xyz/demo.html
| commoner wrote:
| Firefox's fingerprinting protection disables these sensors and
| shows no data in the demo, even on Android. To enable this
| feature, go to about:config and set
| privacy.resistFingerprinting to true:
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-protection-agai...
|
| This feature is enabled by default on some Firefox forks like
| Mull.[1] On Android only, the release channel of Firefox
| disables about:config entirely,[2] but Firefox Beta and Nightly
| have about:config available.
|
| [1] Mull: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/
|
| [2] Please vote to remove this ridiculous restriction at
| https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/firefox-for-android-abo...
| berkes wrote:
| Looking at this page makes me think that it's probably possible
| to detect _that_ (not what) people are speaking or typing.
|
| I placed my phone on the surface. And did see the numbers jank
| when I started typing. Then I left it at rest and said a loud
| "Booo!" and saw the numbers jump again. To confirm, I'd need to
| plot the numbers and do some statistical analysis, which is far
| too much work for me now :D
| lfodofod wrote:
| This attack is nothing new, has been endlessly discussed by the
| grapheneos team. An accelerometer is just a shitty microphone,
| even a camera can be a shitty microphone.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I have actually used a (nice, high fidelity and sample rate)
| accelerometer as a mic. Rolloff is somewhere around 400Hz. Just
| popped the accel data into audacity and played it back.
| karbjlnms wrote:
| Didn't Android already restrict access to accelerometer data by
| default?
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(page generated 2022-12-30 23:01 UTC)