Boffins blast beats to bury secret sonar in your 'smart' home Researchers at the University of Washington have devised a way of conducting surreptitious sonar surveillance using home devices equipped with microphones and speakers. The technique, called CovertBand, looks beyond the obvious possibility of using a microphone-equipped device for eavesdropping. It explores how devices with …
Depends on a variety of things :)
Your phone mobile is permanently wired, it can't be disconnected. As to wether it's "active" is down to software, listening to the input channel.
The various assistants (Siri etc) can be configured to either "listen all the time" (keyword activation) or after a button press (Siri). But do you trust that's what they're actually doing? :)
If you've got a Smartphone, and you can't take the battery out, you can't be 100% certain that it's not listening, That's the basic fact. Assuming you haven't run some third party apps with access to microphones, or granted access to those apps, then you should be "as safe as your assistant settings" are configured.
"So why not go Nineteen Eighty-four and ban hard switches?"
There are lots of people who propose that by thinking it's OK if the manufacturer disallows you from modifying the firmware of the device you bought. In fact that's one of the main motivations behind "Secure Boot".
"There are lots of people who propose that by thinking it's OK if the manufacturer disallows you from modifying the firmware of the device you bought. In fact that's one of the main motivations behind "Secure Boot"."
Like buying a fairly expensive drone and then the manufacturer tells you if you don't apply the latest update they'll disable your device and prevent you flying it for your safety.
its a tad late, and if people are now talking about it, it means that the NSA will have a fully working system already running.
Sooooo on past performance, give it a week and they will have given the tools to the enemy and will be blaming North Korea for mapping your movements some time soon
The size of the device limits the effective range - plus sonar doesn't work so well through walls.
If you want to spy through walls, you need something that won't get bounced back by a couple of inches of brick or concrete - and if it's powerful enough to get through that, the soft pink squidgy meatsacks wandering around the room won't show up. Plus the volume would need to be so loud that you'd need to convert everyone to Heavy Metal fans...
I don't understand all these things. Obviously storing your Alexa/Echo unit in a soundproof box in the garden is a good start, but what about phones/laptops etc? Switching off the mic by software presumably can be compromised. Blob of araldite over the built-in mic? Then only use a plug in mic when you need to.
"plug an mp3 player into the external mic socket, playing a constant loop of Never Going To Give You Up."
Do the mic jack plugs physically unplug the built-in mic? If so you could simply plug in a shorted connector.
I think that idea was stopped when people started to use headphones and idiots complained about the phone not working. I think it now needs a proper TRRS connector before anything changes, and that tends to trigger on detected impedance. In short, the answer is no from a pure electrical POV, it's usually done via a soft switch which brings us back to the original problem..
Nope, they're not hardwires. Like on laptops, the OS can track BOTH inputs and simply turns the built-in one off by software when a TRRS device is installed (and it has to be a real one--they detect it by impedance and will flag you if something is amiss, claiming it's a malfunctioning mic). That means something with system-level permissions can override.
"These tests show CovertBand can track walking subjects with a mean tracking error of 18cm and subjects moving at a fixed position with an accuracy of 8cm at up to 6m in line-of-sight and 3m through barriers,"
Precise enough so the H-K drone can snipe you through the roof/walls without visual contact. Impressive
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