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.

Comments

What's worse?

[subk]

This dumb-ass "attack" or the fact that these clowns have jobs as researchers?

Re:You know...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

It turns out that in addition to having vibration motors, smartphones also have regular microphones.

But if the security auditors are only looking for code that gets signals from the microphone, they might miss code that gets signals from the vibrator.

Using the ringer for a room bug has been stock stuff since at least WWII. It has the advantage that it's connected to the line all the time and doesn't require any modification of the phone.

The early electronic piezo-electric sounders, which replaced the electromechanical bell mechanisms, were even better microphones, too. (I recall the blurb on the box of the Unisonic model 7441, which was a two-line phone from about the mid '80s, which had one of each - a bell for line 1 and a piezo sounder for line two. The blurb was really funny: The C-suite character it was attributed to was bragging about being ex-FBI and how important it was to have a secure phone. B-) )