Optical Mouse Captures Speech. Study WARNING for Users Now

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Now, this is both amazing and really scary. Perhaps they can use your mouse to listen to what you're saying. This is from Cyber News. Your gaming mouse can easily ease drop. Here's how. Researchers at the University of California have turned a humble mouse into an unlikely spy. Their experimental project named Mike E- Mouse showed that high-end optical mice, often used by gamers and designers, can double as eavesdropping tools picking up conversations through desk vibrations. We show that it is possible to collect mouse packet data and extract audio waveforms. Moreover, the software scheme used in our pipeline is invisible to the average user during the data collection process, wrote researchers presenting the prototype. So, as they show here, Co ease dropping through computer mice. Your computer mouse has big ears. They say that high performance optical sensors in mice expose a critical vulnerability, one where confidential user speech can be leaked. Attackers can exploit these sensors ever increasing polling rate and sensitivity to emulate a makeshift microphone and covertly eavesdrop on unsuspecting users. We present an attack vector that capitalizes on acoustic vibrations propagated through the users's work surface and we show that existing consumer grade mice can detect these vibrations. Now, probably a lot of you thinking, how does this actually work? Here's the threat model. Our target for a suitable exploit delivery is open- source applications where the collection and distribution of high frequency mouse data is not inherently suspicious. So as an example it would be creative software, video games or other high performance low latency software and they see that as ideal targets for injecting our exploit. They also talk about how video games often contain networking code that can be reused by the exploit without raising any suspicion. Thus, using a video game as a delivery vehicle of their exploit allows them to meet the performance demands of their collection scheme. Now, back on Cyber News, they say while the concept sounds like something from a sci-fi scenario, it actually comes down to basic physics, modern mice, especially those with 20,000 DPI sensors and lightning fast polling rates are insanely sensitive. When someone talks near desk, those sound waves cause micro vibrations on the surface. The mouse's optical sensor quietly captures them in the same way that it tracks subtle hand movements and feeds the data into its connected computer. They could then take that and turn it into speech. By extracting the raw motion packets from the mouse, filtering out irrelevant vibrations and running the data through a neural network. The team were able to reconstruct intelligible speech with up to 61% accuracy. Now, they go through this in a lot of detail on their website, so you can have a look at that, but it's probably going to mean a lot more if we just listen to this ourselves. >> One, two. >> So, you can see there it's busy collecting voice data. >> Here's the raw audio. >> Okay. And then it they do a bunch of processing and then this is what we get towards the end using a neural model 2. >> It's really worrying that now they don't need really expensive mice to do this. Now consumer grade mice with high fidelity sensors are ready readily available for under $50 US. Ultimately these developments entail increased usage of vulnerable mice by consumers. So they say that this expands the attack surface based on these developments. So what do you think? It's amazing what technology can do, but it's also very worrying that stuff like this can actually be developed. And they've already worked out how to do this and how to attack computers by running opensource software as an example and extracting the speech from your mouse. Still a proof of concept, but what do you think? really interesting to learn about this stuff or I mean don't you