EarSpy can spy on your phone calls by utilizing motion sensors
This attack relies on the phone’s ear speakers, and can listen in on your conversations. When you use the speaker at the top of the device, the phone’s accelerometer can capture tiny vibrations generated by that speaker. There was also previous research that focused on capturing vibrations by phone’s loudspeaker. That involved including an external component for capturing data. This works a bit differently, and people are more inclined to talk about sensitive topics while they’re not on a loudspeaker. This approach is way easier to do than using a microphone, for example. Accessing raw data from the motion sensors in a smartphone does not require any special permissions. All that the attacker needs to do in this case is send out a piece of malware to your phone, one way or the other. At that point, it can utilize EarSpy attach in order to listen in on your conversations. Researchers actually discovered that such attacks are more feasible these days, due to improvements to speakers. It’s way easier for motion sensors to pick up vibrations nowadays.
Researchers used OnePlus phones with good ear speakers
The tests were conducted on the OnePlus 7T and OnePlus 9 smartphones. They found out that significantly more data can be captured by the accelerometer from the ear speaker due to the improved sound (stereo effect) compared to earlier models. The experiments analyzed “the reverberation effect of ear speakers on the accelerometer by extracting time-frequency domain features and spectrograms”. This analysis focused on gender recognition, speaker recognition, and speech recognition. EarSpy actually had a 98-percent accuracy when determining the gender of the speaker. Discovering the speaker’s identity was also not a problem, as the accuracy was very high, at 92-percent. The accuracy was way lower when it comes to the actual speech, it was around 56-percent. It is still a thread, though, despite the considerably lower accuracy. It is still five times greater than a random guess, it is said.
