Researchers have just developed an interesting new technology for side channel attacks on smartphones. It is called EarSpy and it is capable of eavesdropping on your phone conversations through the handset’s built in motion sensors.

This tech was developed by a group of researchers from the University of Dayton, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, Texas A&M University, and Temple University. As per their report, the researchers had managed to record vibrations from a phone’s loudspeaker in the past. But now, the new method of attack can even map the vibrations coming from the smartphone’s earpiece. So your conversations can be caught even when you’re talking with the phone on your ear.

EarSpy

The findings were shared on SecurityWeek and EarSpy was tested on the OnePlus 7T and the OnePlus 9 models. Interestingly enough, the results were surprisingly accurate and were made through data that was taken from nothing but the earpiece and the built in accelerometer. Fortunately, older OnePlus models were safe in this regard, but this was due to their lack of stereo speakers as per the research paper. The group recorded and analyzed the reverberations from ear speaker with the help of spectrograms and time-frequency domain feature extraction.

Apart from just capturing the words, the team also worked on identifying gender of the speaker as well. To take things further, there is also a potential risk of this technology being able to determine the identity of the speaker. While new Android versions have a strong security measures against malware, EarSpy is able to bypass all of these security features since the raw data from a smartphone’s motion sensors is a lot more easily accessible. The researchers have noted that smartphone brands should position the motion sensors away from any source of vibrations to reduce the risk of this vulnerability.

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