"Speake (a) r" your headphones become eavesdropping microphones

There is a cautious person who is blocking the jack for the PC's microphone afraid of eavesdropping but hacking technology to invalidate this prevention law "Speake (a) r"Has appeared. A Israeli researcher is developing a technique to eavesdrop on headphones connected by a jack for audio output.

SPEAKE (a) R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun and Profit
(PDF file)https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1611/1611.07350.pdf

Your Headphones Can Spy On You - Even If You Have Disabled Microphone
http://thehackernews.com/2016/11/headphone-spying-malware.html

Some office workers are physically disabling laptop front cameras and microphone jacks for fear of voyeurism and eavesdropping. For example, Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg CEO seems to be blocking the camera and microphone with tape.


However, how much you can eavesdropped by headphones can be confirmed with the following demonstration movie even if you disable the microphone.

"SPEAKE (a) R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun and Profit" - YouTube


Office desktop PC. Headphone and microphone are connected.


Here, when you try to play audio from the image of the wall monitor ... ...


Audio is being recorded.


Even if the microphone switch is turned off ......


Recording is ongoing.


There is no change even if the microphone is pulled out from the PC.


It is caused by headphones that are placed on desks casually playing the role of eavesdropping devices.


This eavesdropping technology "Speake (a) r" was announced by security researchers at Ben-Glion University in Israel. It was known for a long time about compatibility that makes microphones substitute for speakers and speakers instead of microphones, but in this hacking, PCs are infected with malware and the voice output is switched to voice input Method is used.

Speake (a) r realizes by rewriting the audio output of Realtek audio codec chip to voice input, desktop PC and notebook PC adopting Realtek audio codec chips are intercepted by headphones regardless of Windows or Mac It is said that there is a danger to be done. In the experiment, I have successfully sniffed from a place 20 feet (about 6 meters) away, and it has been recorded with quality comparable to a general microphone.

Moldokai Gri, who studied, said, "Even if you remove the microphone from the computer, you can easily record with headphones, people are ignorant about this privacy vulnerability."

Whether or not your PC adopts Realtek 's audio codec chips can be determined by installing the following free software and seeing "Audio" as soon as possible.

"Speccy" free software that displays the temperature of your computer's CPU and HDD, details of each hardware etc. in an easy-to-understand manner - GIGAZINE