Mouse Sensors Can Pick Up Speech From Surface Vibrations, Researchers Show

'A group of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, have developed a way to use the sensors in high-quality optical mice to capture subtle vibrations and convert them into audible data,' reports Tom's Hardware:

[T]he high polling rate and sensitivity of high-performance optical mice pick up acoustic vibrations from the surface where they sit. By running the raw data through signal processing and machine learning techniques, the team could hear what the user was saying through their desk. Mouse sensors with a 20,000 DPI or higher are vulnerable to this attack. And with the best gaming mice becoming more affordable annually, even relatively affordable peripherals are at risk....

[T]his compromise does not necessarily mean a complicated virus installed through a backdoor — it can be as simple as an infected FOSS that requires high-frequency mouse data, like creative apps or video games. This means it's not unusual for the software to gather this data. From there, the collected raw data can be extracted from the target computer and processed off-site. 'With only a vulnerable mouse, and a victim's computer running compromised or even benign software (in the case of a web-based attack surface), we show that it is possible to collect mouse packet data and extract audio waveforms,' the researchers state.

The researchers created a video with raw audio samples from various stages in their pipeline on an accompanying web site where they calculate that 'the majority of human speech' falls in a frequency range detectable by their pipeline. While the collected signal 'is low-quality and suffers from non-uniform sampling, a non-linear frequency response, and extreme quantization,' the researchers augment it with 'successive signal processing and machine learning techniques to overcome these challenges and achieve intelligible reconstruction of user speech.'

They've titled their paper Invisible Ears at Your Fingertips: Acoustic Eavesdropping via Mouse Sensors. The paper's conclusion? 'The increasing precision of optical mouse sensors has enhanced user interface performance but also made them vulnerable to side-channel attacks exploiting their sensitivity.'

Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the article.

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