sounds emitted by hidden listening devices

The researchers were initially unsure if a vacuum bot’s Lidar system could be manipulated to function as a microphone, and if the resulting signal could be meaningfully interpreted.įirst, they hacked a robot vacuum to show they could control the position of the laser beam and send the data to their laptops through Wi-Fi without interfering with the device’s navigation. The scattered signal received by the vacuum’s sensor provides only a fraction of the information needed to recover sound waves. But laser microphones rely on a targeted laser beam reflecting off very smooth surfaces, such as glass windows.Ī vacuum Lidar, on the other hand, scans the environment with a laser and senses the light scattered back by objects that are irregular in shape and density. Laser microphones, used in espionage since the 1940s, are capable of converting those variations back into sound waves. Sound waves cause objects to vibrate, and these vibrations cause slight variations in the light bouncing off an object.

Roy and his team wondered if the Lidar in these robots could also pose potential security risks as sound recording devices in users’ homes or businesses. The maps, often stored in the cloud,could give advertisers access to information about such things as home size, which suggests income level, and other lifestyle-related information. Privacy experts have suggested that the house maps the vacuum bots make using Lidar, allowing them to avoid collisions risk potential privacy breaches. “But we have shown that even though these devices don’t have microphones, we can repurpose the systems they use for navigation to spy on conversations and potentially reveal private information.”

“We welcome these devices into our homes, and we don’t think anything about it,” said Roy, who holds a joint appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). This work, which Roy co-led with Assistant Professor Jun Han at the National University of Singapore was presented today at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. The project demonstrates the potential for any device that uses light detection and ranging (Lidar) technology to be manipulated for collecting sound. The researchers, including Assistant Professor Nirupam Roy, collected information from the laser-based navigation system in a popular vacuum robot and applied signal processing and deep learning techniques to recover speech and identify television programs playing in the same room as the device. Those cute little autonomous floor cleaners could be sweeping up more than just dust in your house, according to a team of researchers including a University of Maryland computer scientist that showed how popular robotic vacuums can be remotely hacked to collect audio, even though the devices were never designed to do so.

Sounds emitted by hidden listening devices