Hackers Can Hear Conversations Through Robot Vacuum Cleaners

guest · Nov 23, 2020

Hackers Can Hear Conversations Through Robot Vacuum Cleaners
Robot vacuum cleaners can be turned into “laser-microphones,” sending sound waves to hackers over Wi-Fi
November 18, 2020
https://www.technadu.com/hackers-can-hear-conversations-through-robot-vacuum-cleaners/225684/

Researchers from the University of Maryland have figured out a smart way to listen to whatever is going on inside a home where a robot vacuum cleaner operates.
What’s weird is that these vacuums don’t even have a microphone on them, so one has to wonder, how did the researchers do it?

The system targeted in this study was the navigation system, which helps the vacuum cleaner go around the house without hitting walls and furniture. This is a “LiDAR” system, measuring distances by illuminating the target with a laser light beam that’s invisible to the human eye.
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Sound is a wave too, and all waves make objects vibrate when they hit them.
So, essentially, the vacuum cleaner is able to tell apart even these small differences, and an interpreter can be deployed to discern the sound waves and translate them to speech or music.

That data can reach a remote actor via Wi-Fi, and manipulating the LiDAR system won’t interfere with the robot’s regular navigation and vacuuming functionality. This essentially means that a hacker could be listening to your conversations without you ever realizing it.
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As for the question of accuracy, the researchers managed to identify spoken numbers with 90% accuracy during their tests and identified TV shows using minute-long recordings with similar success rates.
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Technical paper: Spying with your robot vacuum cleaner: eavesdropping via lidar sensors
(PDF): https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3384419.3430781
or: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~nirupam/images/2_publication/papers/LidarPhone_SenSys20_nirupam.pdf

Threatpost: Robot Vacuums Suck Up Sensitive Audio in ‘LidarPhone’ Hack

Researchers have unveiled an attack that allows attackers to eavesdrop on homeowners inside their homes, through the LiDAR sensors on their robot vacuums.
The attack, called “LidarPhone” by researchers, in particular targets vacuums with LiDAR sensors, as the name suggests.

The good news is that the attack is complex: Attackers would need to have already compromised the device itself (in their attack, researchers utilized a previously discovered attack on the vacuum cleaners). Additionally, attackers would need to be on the victim’s local network to launch the attack.
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Threatpost has reached out to the researchers for further information on the specific equipment utilized to launch the attack, as well as the complexity of the attack; and will update this article accordingly.
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