Eavesdropping on Black-box Mobile Devices via Audio Amplifier's EMR
Huiling Chen
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2024 · Day 2 · Audio & Voice Security
In an era where digital privacy is paramount, the talk "Eavesdropping on Black-box Mobile Devices via Audio Amplifier's EMR" by Huiling Chen unveils a critical and previously underestimated vulnerability. The research, embodied in a system dubbed **Periscope**, demonstrates a novel method for surreptitiously recovering private audio from mobile devices, even when users are diligently using headphones to maintain acoustic privacy. This work fundamentally challenges the assumption that headphones provide sufficient isolation against eavesdropping, revealing that the very act of plugging them in can inadvertently enhance a device's susceptibility to electromagnetic radiation (EMR) side-channel attacks.