EarSpy: Spying on Phone Calls via Ear Speaker Vibrations Captured by Accelerometer

guest · Jan 1, 2023

By Eduard Kovacs @EduardKovacs - December 28, 2022

As smartphone manufacturers are improving the ear speakers in their devices, it can become easier for malicious actors to leverage a particular side-channel for eavesdropping on a targeted user’s conversations, according to a team of researchers from several universities in the United States.
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The attack method, named EarSpy, is described in a paper published just before Christmas by researchers from Texas A&M University, Temple University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, and the University of Dayton.

EarSpy relies on the phone’s ear speaker — the speaker at the top of the device that is used when the phone is held to the ear — and the device’s built-in accelerometer for capturing the tiny vibrations generated by the speaker.
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When it comes to actual speech, the accuracy was up to 56% for capturing digits spoken in a phone call.

“[This] accuracy still exhibits five times greater accuracy than a random guess, which implies that vibration due to the ear speaker induced a reasonable amount of distinguishable impact on accelerometer data,” the researchers said.
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arXiv: EarSpy: Spying Caller Speech and Identity through Tiny Vibrations of Smartphone Ear Speakers

Eavesdropping from the user's smartphone is a well-known threat to the user's safety and privacy. Existing studies show that loudspeaker reverberation can inject speech into motion sensor readings, leading to speech eavesdropping. While more devastating attacks on ear speakers, which produce much smaller scale vibrations, were believed impossible to eavesdrop with zero-permission motion sensors.

In this work, we revisit this important line of reach. We explore recent trends in smartphone manufacturers that include extra/powerful speakers in place of small ear speakers, and demonstrate the feasibility of using motion sensors to capture such tiny speech vibrations. We investigate the impacts of these new ear speakers on built-in motion sensors and examine the potential to elicit private speech information from the minute vibrations.
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(PDF): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.12151.pdf

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EarSpy: Spying on Phone Calls via Ear Speaker Vibrations Captured by Accelerometer

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