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posted by martyb on Saturday March 09 2019, @09:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the deep-seated-insecurities-and-paranoia dept.

From that unimpeachable source . . . The Reg . . .

From hard drive to over-heard drive: Boffins convert spinning rust into eavesdropping mic

It's not just the walls that have ears. It's also the hard drives.

Eggheads at the University of Michigan in the US, and Zhejiang University in China, have found that hard disk drives (HDDs) can be turned into listening devices, using malicious firmware and signal processing calculations.

For a study titled "Hard Drive of Hearing: Disks that Eavesdrop with a Synthesized Microphone," computer scientists Andrew Kwong, Wenyuan Xu, and Kevin Fu describe an acoustic side-channel that can be accessed by measuring how sound waves make hard disk parts vibrate.

"Our research demonstrates that the mechanical components in magnetic hard disk drives behave as microphones with sufficient precision to extract and parse human speech," their paper, obtained by The Register ahead of its formal publication, stated. "These unintentional microphones sense speech with high enough fidelity for the Shazam service to recognize a song recorded through the hard drive."

One limiting aspect of the described technique is that it requires a fairly loud conversation in the vicinity of the eavesdropping hard drive. To record comprehensible speech, the conversation had to reach 85 dBA, with 75 dBA being the low threshold for capturing muffled sound. To get Shazam to identify recordings captured through a hard drive, the source file had to be played at 90 dBA. Which is pretty loud. Like lawn mower or food blender loud.

The researchers acknowledge this is louder than most practical scenarios but they say they "expect that an attacker using state of the art filtering and voice recognition algorithms can substantially amplify the channel’s strength."

Hopefully SSD drives are not vulnerable.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @05:07PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @05:07PM (#812053)

    Because you said this:

    If you require a system that will not leak data, you have to completely isolate it from EM signals, network / comm connections and other people

    Either the human brain is leaking data or (less likely) nature has devised a solution to this problem.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Saturday March 09 2019, @05:17PM (4 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Saturday March 09 2019, @05:17PM (#812057) Journal

    So, you're reading "system" as "human brain"?

    In that regard, it's useful to note that any number of people can keep a secret. If all but one of them are dead and no one brings a wrench to the party. [xkcd.com]

    --
    The gene pool is shallow. And polluted.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @05:40PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @05:40PM (#812065)

      Yes, I read system in the general sense. Why shouldn't I?

      • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday March 09 2019, @05:58PM (2 children)

        by fyngyrz (6567) on Saturday March 09 2019, @05:58PM (#812070) Journal

        Yes, I read system in the general sense. Why shouldn't I?

        Well, most of us use context to guide our understanding. Inasmuch as TFS/TFA is about hard drives affecting security, that context would be a system that used a hard drive.

        Also, as you found out, not using context as a guide led your becoming bewildered and posting irrelevant nonsense.

        Lastly, if the intent was to troll, that effort would have to look up to see the surface scum on the pond of lameness. 😊

        --
        The five stages of Winter:
        Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and April.

        • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @06:13PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @06:13PM (#812078)

          Do you have some reason to think the brain doesn't leak data? What is the diference?

          • (Score: 5, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Saturday March 09 2019, @06:34PM

            by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday March 09 2019, @06:34PM (#812090) Journal

            You may be onto something there. My body leaks data about what I had for dinner last night.

            --
            Washington DC delenda est.