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from the your-android-needs-to-be-more-paranoid dept.
The Register has a story on a new technique which turns commodity devices with microphones and speakers into active sonar systems
The technique, called CovertBand, looks beyond the obvious possibility of using a microphone-equipped device for eavesdropping. It explores how devices with audio inputs and outputs can be turned into echo-location devices capable of calculating the positions and activities of people in a room.
In a paper [PDF] titled "CovertBand: Activity Information Leakage using Music," Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Alex Takakuwa, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Shyamnath Gollakota describe a way to transmit acoustic pulses in the 18‑20 kHz range, masked by music, from the speaker and tracking sound reflected by the human body using microphones
The project home page includes further details, and the paper details proof of concept implementations on an Android and Smart TV device, which demonstrate both accurate tracking, and the ability to infer information about what the target is doing.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Tuesday August 22 2017, @03:28PM (2 children)
...that Batman was right [youtube.com] all along.
Now where's my grappling hook?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @04:28PM
You only want to trick us into playing the sound associated with that video, so that you can echo-locate our surroundings! ;-)
(Actually, using specifically that video for that purpose would be hilarious.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @03:40AM
Yes, even more right than you want to admit. [youtube.com]