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AccEar: Accelerometer Acoustic Eavesdropping with Unconstrained Vocabulary (arxiv.org)
2 points by throwaway71271 on Nov 14, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A phone's motion sensor picks up loudspeaker vibrations, and a generative model turns those faint wiggles into full speech, even the high notes it never measured. Unlike earlier tricks limited to a fixed word list, it rebuilt any speech, tested on 16 public figures' recordings.

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of voice-based applications, acoustic eavesdropping has become a serious threat to users' privacy. While on smartphones the access to microphones needs an explicit user permission, acoustic eavesdropping attacks can rely on motion sensors (such as accelerometer and gyroscope), which access is unrestricted. However, previous instances of such attacks can only recognize a limited set of pre-trained words or phrases. In this paper, we present AccEar, an accelerometerbased acoustic eavesdropping attack that can reconstruct any audio played on the smartphone's loudspeaker with unconstrained vocabulary. We show that an attacker can employ a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) to reconstruct highfidelity audio from low-frequency accelerometer signals. The presented cGAN model learns to recreate high-frequency components of the user's voice from low-frequency accelerometer signals through spectrogram enhancement. We assess the feasibility and effectiveness of AccEar attack in a thorough set of experiments using audio from 16 public personalities. As shown by the results in both objective and subjective evaluations, AccEar successfully reconstructs user speeches from accelerometer signals in different scenarios including varying sampling rate, audio volume, device model, etc.

Pengfei Hu, Hui Zhuang, Panneer Selvam Santhalingamy, Riccardo Spolaor, Parth Pathaky, Guoming Zhang, Xiuzhen Cheng
arXiv:2212.01042 · cs.SD, cs.CR, eess.AS · submitted Dec 2, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · 2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)

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