Collaborate Disseminate
New research is able to recover sound waves in a room by observing minute changes in the room’s light bulbs. This technique works from a distance, even from a building across the street through a window. Details: In an experiment using three different telescopes with different lens diameters from a distance of 25 meters (a little over 82 feet) the… Continue reading Eavesdropping on Sound Using Variations in Light Bulbs
Remember Spectre and Meltdown? Back in early 2018, I wrote: Spectre and Meltdown are pretty catastrophic vulnerabilities, but they only affect the confidentiality of data. Now that they — and the research into the Intel ME vulnerability — have shown … Continue reading Another Intel Speculative Execution Vulnerability
Remember Spectre and Meltdown? Back in early 2018, I wrote: Spectre and Meltdown are pretty catastrophic vulnerabilities, but they only affect the confidentiality of data. Now that they — and the research into the Intel ME vulnerability — have shown researchers where to look, more is coming — and what they’ll find will be worse than either Spectre or Meltdown…. Continue reading Another Intel Speculative Execution Vulnerability
I previously wrote about hacking voice assistants with lasers. Turns you can do much the same thing with ultrasonic waves: Voice assistants — the demo targeted Siri, Google Assistant, and Bixby — are designed to respond when they detect the owner’s voice after noticing a trigger phrase such as ‘Ok, Google’. Ultimately, commands are just sound waves, which other researchers… Continue reading Hacking Voice Assistants with Ultrasonic Waves
Not that serious, but interesting: In late 2011, Intel introduced a performance enhancement to its line of server processors that allowed network cards and other peripherals to connect directly to a CPU’s last-level cache, rather than following the standard (and significantly longer) path through the server’s main memory. By avoiding system memory, Intel’s DDIOshort for Data-Direct I/Oincreased input/output bandwidth and… Continue reading Another Side Channel in Intel Chips
Several high-security electronic locks are vulnerable to side-channel attacks involving power monitoring…. Continue reading Side-Channel Attack against Electronic Locks
Yet another side-channel attack on smartphones: "Hearing your touch: A new acoustic side channel on smartphones," by Ilia Shumailov, Laurent Simon, Jeff Yan, and Ross Anderson. Abstract: We present the first acoustic side-channel attack that re… Continue reading Recovering Smartphone Typing from Microphone Sounds
Yet another side-channel attack on smartphones: "Hearing your touch: A new acoustic side channel on smartphones," by Ilia Shumailov, Laurent Simon, Jeff Yan, and Ross Anderson. Abstract: We present the first acoustic side-channel attack that recovers what users type on the virtual keyboard of their touch-screen smartphone or tablet. When a user taps the screen with a finger, the tap… Continue reading Recovering Smartphone Typing from Microphone Sounds
It’s only a prototype, but this USB cable has an embedded Wi-Fi controller. Whoever controls that Wi-Fi connection can remotely execute commands on the attached computer…. Continue reading USB Cable with Embedded Wi-Fi Controller
It’s amazing that this is even possible: "SonarSnoop: Active Acoustic Side-Channel Attacks": Abstract: We report the first active acoustic side-channel attack. Speakers are used to emit human inaudible acoustic signals and the echo is recorded via microphones, turning the acoustic system of a smart phone into a sonar system. The echo signal can be used to profile user interaction with… Continue reading Using a Smartphone’s Microphone and Speakers to Eavesdrop on Passwords