Linus Tech Tips Discussion

 Gaming mouse sensors are good enough to be used as a microphone in new exploit paper   Summary  Good mouse sensors (eg. the ones in gaming mice) are sensitive enough to pick up the vibrations of human speech through the surface that the mouse is sitting on. An unprivileged application with access to the high polling rate mouse data can facilitate the exploit - the paper specifically calls out graphics applications and games. The vulnerability uses an audio filtering and AI processing pipeline (which the author's have named Mic-E-Mouse to clean up the captured mouse data and turn it into something understandable to human listeners.   Quotes   Quote A group of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, have developed a way to use the sensors in high-quality optical mice to capture subtle vibrations and convert them into audible data. According to the abstract of Mic-E-Mouse (full PDF here), the high polling rate and sensitivity of high-performance optical mice pick up acoustic vibrations from the surface where they sit. By running the raw data through signal processing and machine learning techniques, the team could hear what the user was saying through their desk. source: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/high-performance-mice-can-be-used-as-a-microphone-to-spy-on-users-thanks-to-ai-mic-e-mouse-technique-uses-mouse-sensors-to-convert-acoustic-vibrations-into-speech   Quote High-Performance Optical Sensors in Mice expose a critical vulnerability — one where confidential user speech can be leaked. Attackers can exploit these sensors’ ever-increasing polling rate and sensitivity to emulate a makeshift microphone and covertly eavesdrop on unsuspecting users. We present an attack vector that capitalizes on acoustic vibrations propagated through the user’s work surface, and we show that existing consumer-grade mice can detect these vibrations. However, the collected signal is low-quality and suffers from non-uniform sampling, a non-linear frequency response, and extreme quantization. We introduce Mic-E-Mouse, a pipeline consisting of successive signal processing and machine learning techniques to overcome these challenges and achieve intelligible reconstruction of user speech. source: https://sites.google.com/view/mic-e-mouse     Quote We posit that the seemingly innocuous computer mouse is the source of yet another vulnerability. Importantly, we claim recent advancements in mouse sensor resolution can be sufficient to enable a side-channel attack capable of extracting user speech. Through our Mic-E-Mouse pipeline, vibrations detected by the mouse on the victim user’s desk are transformed into comprehensive audio, allowing an attacker to eavesdrop o