Eavesdropping on Laptop, Smart Speaker Microphones Demonstrated in New Security Attack (UF News)

Eavesdropping on Laptop, Smart Speaker Microphones Demonstrated in New Security Attack

The ghostly woman’s voice pipes through the speakers, covered in radio static but her message intact from beyond — “The birch canoe slid on the smooth planks.”

A secret message from the other side? A spectral insight?

No, something much spookier: Voice recordings captured, secretly, from the radio frequencies emitted by ubiquitous, cheap microphones in laptops and smart speakers. These unintentional signals pass, ghost-like, through walls, only to be captured by simple radio components and translated back to static-filled — but easily intelligible — speech.

For the first time, researchers at the University of Florida and the University of Electro-Communications in Japan have revealed a security and privacy risk inherent in the design of these microphones, which emit radio signals as a kind of interference when processing audio data.

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