Security News > 2020 > November > New 'LidarPhone' Attack Uses Robot Vacuum Cleaners for Eavesdropping
A group of academic researchers has devised a new eavesdropping attack that leverages the lidar sensors present in commodity robot vacuum cleaners.
The same method is used by laser microphones and basically LidarPhone transforms the lidar sensors on the vacuum cleaning robot into microphones.
According to the researchers, some of the main limitations of this attack include the fact that the intensity of sound vibrations is lower when objects are not in direct contact with the speakers, and the fact that the robot is continuously moving when operational - thus, it is more plausible to launch an attack when the robot is idle.
The researchers implemented LidarPhone on a Xiaomi Roborock vacuum cleaning robot and concluded that it can achieve high accuracy for digit and music classification.
"LidarPhone allows the adversary to obtain privacy sensitive speech information from laser beams reflected off of minutely vibrating objects located near the victim's computer speaker or TV soundbar. [] While we investigate lidars on robot vacuum cleaners as an exemplary case, our findings may be extended to many other active light sensors including smartphone time-of-flight sensors," the researchers say.