Security News > 2020 > March > Hackers Can Use Ultrasonic Waves to Secretly Control Voice Assistant Devices

Researchers have discovered a new means to target voice-controlled devices by propagating ultrasonic waves through solid materials in order to interact with and compromise them using inaudible voice commands without the victims' knowledge.

It's possible for an attacker to interact with the devices using the voice assistants, hijack SMS two-factor authentication codes, and even place fraudulent calls, the researchers outlined in the paper, thus controlling the victim device inconspicuously.

To conceal the attack from the victim, the researchers then issued a guided ultrasonic wave to adjust the volume of the device low enough to make the voice responses unnoticeable, while still be able to record the voice responses from the assistant via a hidden tapping device closer to the victim's device underneath the table.

Once set up, an interloper can not only activate the voice assistants, but also generate attack commands using text-to-speech systems - all of which are transmitted in the form of ultrasonic guided wave signals that can propagate along the table to control the devices.

SurfingAttack was tested with a variety of devices that use voice assistants, such as the Google Pixel, Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy S9, and Xiaomi Mi 8, and each of them were found to be vulnerable to ultrasonic wave attacks.

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