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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