It seems that the robot vacuum cleaners that you have at your home not only can pick up the dust and dirt in your home. It can also pick up your private conversations. Computer scientists from NUS have demonstrated this capability through their work which was presented last month at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2020).
The novel method, called LidarPhone, repurposes the Lidar sensor that a robot vacuum cleaner normally uses for navigating around a home into a laser-based microphone to eavesdrop on private conversations.
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The core of the LidarPhone attack method is the Lidar sensor, a device which fires out an invisible scanning laser, and creates a map of its surroundings. By reflecting lasers off common objects such as a dustbin or a takeaway bag located near a person's computer speaker or television soundbar, the attacker could obtain information about the original sound that made the objects' surfaces vibrate. Using applied signal processing and deep learning algorithms, speech could be recovered from the audio data, and sensitive information could potentially be obtained.
Learn more about this over at TechXplore.
Scary.
(Image Credit: National University of Singapore/ TechXplore)
But there is an easy solution: just say: "Alexa, how do i prevent that my robot vacuum cleaer is abused as an covert listeing device?"