Using an off-the-shelf automotive radar sensor and a novel processing approach, a team of scientists has been able to "eavesdrop remotely" on other people's phone conversations.
The scientists demonstrated their technology in the 2022 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Symposium on Security and Privacy, with a view to warning against this possible security flaw.
“As technology becomes more reliable and robust over time, the misuse of such sensing technologies by adversaries becomes probable,” doctoral candidate Suryoday Basak said.
“Our demonstration of this kind of exploitation contributes to the pool of scientific literature that broadly says, ‘Hey! Automotive radars can be used to eavesdrop audio. We need to do something about this.’”
In the ‘mmSpy’ demonstration, the researchers simulated people speaking through the earpiece of a smartphone. The phone’s earpiece vibrated from the speech and that vibration permeated across...