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Researchers Turn Smartphone Vibration Motor Into Microphone To Spy On You (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Softpedia: Two researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have come up with a method to turn smartphone vibration motors into makeshift microphones, capable of recording the sound around them. The attack relies on using the vibration motor's coil to record incoming sound waves, which are then transmitted to the attacker, who then uses a processing algorithm to enhance the signal by reconstructing high-frequency waves. This is needed because the vibra-motor can only pick up low-frequency sounds, up to 2 kHz. Their method doesn't yield perfect results (4 in 5 people can understand the sounds) and also needs physical access to the device, but it puts in place the theoretical details needed to carry out and refine such attacks in the future.
No one is spying on you in this manner. These are the types of attacks that would be used by nations, not individuals. Why would anyone worry about this? It's a non-issue, especially because there are far easier ways to spy on most people. Besides, none of you are that interesting, no matter how much you might think otherwise.
It turns out that in addition to having vibration motors, smartphones also have regular microphones.
Who'da thunk?
It requires much more than simple "physical access." They hardwired the vibration motor to an analog input.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
...why not just install a microphone connected to the LINE IN instead of wiring the vibration motor to it as they have done?
This dumb-ass "attack" or the fact that these clowns have jobs as researchers?
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
Making the microphone vibrate.. hmm thatâ(TM)s a challenge . Most of the cheap chinese phones can achieve that automagically.
Apps should have to request access to vibration functions anyway. I'm sick of link-hijacking popunders that can vibrate my phone from through my browser.
Why??
What is the purpose of this exercise?
Why are educational funds going to this type of research?
What's the expected end result?
Why is this news, other than to inflame those whom think this type of stuff is crap..
Can a researcher please turn my smrtphone vibrator into a vibrator so i can stick it in my pocket and have fun calling myself all day?
THX!
No one can "Spy On You" using this method on any stock production phone. The vibration motor is connected to an *output* of the chip that drives it, not an *input*. Additionally, that output is likely to be digital rather than analog, so even its direction could be magically reversed, the likelihood of the chip being able to process whatever signal the motor would produce in response to ambient sounds would be just about zero. And if someone was modifying your phone in order to hear your conversations, there are *much* easier, faster, more reliable, less convoluted ways of doing it - like piggybacking on the microphone that's already there.
The ability to use a vibration motor as a microphone is a technical curiosity, but it's not at all surprising to anyone familiar with basic electrical and electronic concepts. The researchers' work is a nice proof-of-concept which may find useful application at some point. But really, the title of TFA, (and TFS), is solidly in the province of yellow journalism. There are more than enough *real* reasons to fear for our privacy - there's absolutely no need to further stoke that fire with false fears like those being promoted here.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
It's not the same thing as the vibration device, but I wonder if at the top collection speed the accelerometer included in pretty much all modern smartphones has enough fidelity of measurement to record sound.. that would be interesting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you can physically manipulate the device, plant a proper microphone. If not, this is irrelevant, as there is no A/D input connected to that motor. The whole thing is an utterly worthless stunt by "researchers" greedy for attention but lacking in actual scientific skill. Why does this get reported here?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So someone with physical access to your phone can add a couple of wires to it and connect your phone to a computer that decodes some signals to listen to you??? I guess I am missing the part where this makes ant kind of sense. Don't pay attention to the wires sticking out of your phone. Don't pay attention to the computer these wires go into. Also we are going to record you at the frequencies that are useless for listening....
You can't handle the truth.
Nonsense.
Besides, 2kHz is well into treble range. Yes.
This is a case of copycats seeing it work elsewhere so these wackadasicals are giving it a go.
One could use the same technique to hack a vibrating dildo into a listening device then wire a small cell phone into the dildo to transmit the signals. Interesting this would actually be easier and stealthier than the proposed attack. Or equally stupid. Why is this on slashdot?
I yell random things in my car that would normally get a person arrested if they said them in public. Haven't been arrested yet. Or they know it's harmless venting.
I'm sure it's not that hard to gain access to the microphone either legitimately or otherwise (or via a EULA, which is both), so why bother with a glorified hard to access pseudo-microphone? I mean I guess it's cool in a technological way, but it just seems like a long way round to achieve your nefarious ends.
So these researchers didn't bother with it.
http://www.gmanetwork.com/news...
Instead they created a ridiculous hack that involves opening your phone and *not* just putting a microphone inside!
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Headline: Is your tree about to kill you in a suicide attack???
Subtitle: Man carves statue of prophet Mohammed
Article then goes on to allude that there's some way a carved statue of the prophet is associated with terrorism blah blah blah...
This is the sort of garbage internet and TV "news" that needs to be rejected out-of-hand as publicity stunts. The stuff done in the article is NOT something some distant hacker can remotely do to somebody's smartphone. It requires physical access to the phone and then does not even work properly. Hint: if somebody has physical access to hack your phone, they can easily implant a better-performing and smarter "bug"
I despise these sorts of gimmicks that are just designed to hype impractical idiocies and drive money/publicity to the "experts" behind them. They churn this sort of garbage out and then everybody is supposed to "oooh" and "aaaaaah" over what they've done and written and pretend that it is in any way practical or relevant and that these people should be considered "experts" in security that people should buy books and pay for lectures from.
That same vibration motor powers your favorite sex toy!
Obviously, but in what way with what degree of success?
Sometimes there doesn't have to be but a workaround can be useful. As an example a few years ago I attended a presentation on Transmission Electron Microscopy on some structures in teeth related to tooth growth right down to the atomic level. Calcium atoms could not be imaged - data was missing from the signal due to lack of resolution. However comparing computer models of defocused images of different structures could be matched with the real images with not enough resolution to be focused led to being able to derive the structure without actually being able to properly image it.
That's an example of taking incomplete data and generating something that could have produced that incomplete data. If you can get a very large amount of the incomplete data, the missing signal is repetitive and you can model the degradation it's possible to model artificial data going through the same process and match it to the real data. I'd be interested to see what they are getting and how.
The important thing is that the low frequency noise is not always going to be the only clue and there can be some expectation as to what the original source is going to look like - eg. model of human speech and matching from running that through a filter matching the expected degradation. How the clues are put together could be interesting.
Attacker needs to borrow phone, split it open, add a bunch of wires and jumpers, put phone back together -- and then the quality is such that few people understand the words spoken.
Great experiment - but I am missing the point. Sure is neat that this kind of device could be used. Might they instead extend the attack use a doorbell ringer or something?
They were probably looking for a vibration/earthquake detector and someone noticed they could understand conversations in the room.
Hey we can publish this, give it to one of the students. Shows off their vibration detector or whatever, but pretty useless.
queue video of Snowden ripping the motor out of a mobile phone.
In other news, dildos vibrations send txt messages over bluetooth to Tim Cook.
because hackers want to be able to control a phone with a microphone.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.