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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.
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?
Nice try Obama!!!
"especially because there are far easier ways to spy on most people" You mean like the purpose built microphone on every smartphone?
I would say that this gets reported is worse.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.