Security News > 2022 > September > Boffins build microphone safety kit to detect eavesdroppers

Scientists from the National University of Singapore and Yonsei University in the Republic of Korea have developed a device for verifying whether your laptop microphone is secretly recording your conversations.

The mic-monitoring gadget is described in an ArXiv paper titled, "TickTock: Detecting Microphone Status in Laptops Leveraging Electromagnetic Leakage of Clock Signals."

Citing the increase in remote privacy attacks on laptop computers for surveillance, the five co-authors observe that while defenses have been developed for laptop webcams - e.g. a piece of tape, as favored by mark Zuckerberg - there's no analogous sound-blocking barrier to prevent surreptitious listening.

"Second, these solutions are incorporated in only a small fraction of devices, hence most current day laptops do not have a way to detect/prevent eavesdropping."

Some work needed.... TickTock as a prototype consists of a near-field probe, a radio-frequency amplifier, software defined radio and a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. The researchers envision the device's final form will be similar to a USB drive, one that can be placed next to, or clipped to, a laptop to alert the user to any change in the device's mic status.

"Although our approach works well on 90 percent of the tested laptops, including all tested models from popular vendors such as Lenovo, Dell, HP and Asus, TickTock fails to detect the mic clock signals in three laptops, all of which are Apple MacBooks," the boffins state in their paper.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/09/12/mic_monitoring_spying/