Security News > 2020 > February > Your phone wakes up. Its assistant starts reading out your text messages. To everyone around. You panic. How? Ultrasonic waves

Voice commands encoded in ultrasonic waves can, best case scenario, silently activate a phone's digital assistant, and order it to do stuff like read out text messages and make phone calls, we're told.

In the video demo below, a handset placed on a table wakes up after the voice assistant is activated by inaudible ultrasonic waves.

Silent commands transmitted via these pulses stealthily instruct the assistant to perform various tasks, such as taking a photo with the front facing camera, read out the handset's text messages, and making fraudulent calls to contacts.

It's basically a way to get up to mischief with Google Assistant or Apple's Siri on a nearby phone without the owner realizing it's you causing the shenanigans nor why it's happening - if, of course, they hear it wake up and start doing stuff.

Qiben Yan, first author of the paper and an assistant professor of computer science at Michigan State University, told The Register the team used Lyrebird to mimic voices in their experiment.

News URL

https://go.theregister.co.uk/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/28/smartphone_ultrasonic_hack/