Spies can eavesdrop by watching a light bulb's vibrations
wired.com
wired.com
Since capacitors differ in their high-frequency characteristics (and capacitors with good high-frequency properties are often types with small capacity, while large capacitors usually have worse high-frequency response), decoupling often involves the use of a combination of capacitors. For example in logic circuits, a common arrangement is ~100 nF ceramic per logic IC (multiple ones for complex ICs), combined with electrolytic or tantalum capacitor(s) up to a few hundred μF per board or board section.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130918021523/http://www.nsa.go...
https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/decla...
I've always wondered what places communication started getting hidden since we went online and no longer rely on things like numbers stations or drop boxes (though I assume dead drops still exist)
Not great if you don't have easy access, but reliable enough for e.g. a dorm room or a living room.
This was a lab we did in an intro EE class in college and it worked wonders as a "whoa cool" demonstration with very basic EE knowledge required.
https://www.wired.com/2015/03/spencer-harding-the-long-lines...
Is an old project, that I have memorized the bookmark ('Optar', is another project somewhere on that page that puts a multi-kb 2d barcode data on a printed page to be reliably scanned in, even if damaged)
Very simply, I literally just wired the laser in series with the headphones, like, attached directly to the battery of the laser pointer so the audio +/- 5v would jiggle the laser's brightness around that value (the laser was also +5v so this "just works" if I recall. I might have had a resistor in there, and at some point, current leaked back into my iPod and fried it :)
On the receiving end, same deal, PC speaker audio jack attached to a photodiode and power.
It's remarkably analog, but it's also the same reason that things like the now anachronistic CD-player cassette adapter work, throwing 5V AM signals around :)
In fact, the same principle can be achieved with radio. The Russians once planted a device in a wooden seal they gave to a US ambassador as a gift which, when a focused radio beam was aimed at it, would reflect and oscillate that beam due to vibrations in the air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%28listening_device%...
Maybe someone with more info can fill in the details, but if I remember correctly, when Nokia changed their Silicon Valley offices to downtown Sunnyvale almost a decade ago, they were worried because Apple had offices in the adjacent building. If I remember correctly Nokia put in a bunch of security glass to prevent spying from vibrations in the windows. (There's some irony there, I know...)
It was extremely fun and I've been soldering things here and there ever since.
Regardless, awesome story. I'm glad you found an engineering passion, and kudos to your dad for letting you run with it! :)
On my offices was actually in a large farad cage to reduce/eliminate EMF leaks from workstations.
Huh you can actually buy such things on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Shomer-Tec-SHLSD-Laser-Surveillance-D...
Edit: yikes, those reviews...
Being selected as a vendor, on the other hand...
Past that, the hoops you'll need to jump through depend a lot on which department is handling procurement. If you look at defense-related contracts, you'll also have to go through personal clearance (which can be difficult by itself at higher levels).
To this day, the company's laptops don't have cameras and they have a whole process that you have to go through to use a camera anywhere on company property.
It's the vibrations from sound on glass they want and those are tiny by comparison to the input.
Peter Wright (who wrote spycatcher) was the one who first got to look at The Thing; He actually broke it and had to make a new membrane for the microphone. He also invented (within MI5 at least) their technique for detecting superhet receivers (RAFTER), at one point they apparently were parked next to the soviet receiver.
I'm skeptical even this wouldn't have vulnerabilities however, as history has shown us that cryptography which has not been formally proven is often broken.
[1] I'm using the word "sound" here to differentiate the noise in the auditory sense from noise in the "signal versus noise" sense.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation...
Again, I have no proof of concept here, so take with a grain of salt.
E.g. use something like a illuminated disco ball that continuously randomly changes the source light angle and intensity.
Something like, a vibrating module that you don't really notice but which clouds out any sounds the microphone would pick up (or, to go your route, injects fake audio). You turn it on when you want to be sure the microphone isn't listening, just like you can cover the webcam.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Mic-Lock-Microphone-Blocker-Pack-Surv...
I even remember there where schematics for a laser-microphone circulating on the early 2000s internet that could translate the vibrations of windows into sound.
The voice and music recordings they used in their demonstrations were also louder than the average human conversation, with speakers turned to their maximum volume
I can clearly see vibrations in glass near loud speakers with my naked eye, but when someone is speaking I generally can't see any vibrations. Still really cool that they were able to reproduce sounds this way, but it's not like you can spend 1k and be able to actually listen to conversations using this method.
That is an absolute crazy scaling, I'm not entirely sure how that's possible, though I have a suspicion. If it's an actual scaling law that can be exploited, I would expect you can extend this to entirely practical audio volumes on a shoestring budget.
There's probably a lot of valuable information discussed in such establishments.. especially, say, around Wall St.
Regarding the legal aspects, I'm not sure how much of a legal expectation of privacy one has in a "public" place such as a restaurant or bar, and we've pretty much already accepted ubiquitous video surveillance in such places (even if such videos are often without sound).
Someone could potentially infer speech just by lipreading soundless videos, but if someone did decide to use audio surveillance on their own property in a bar, restaurant, or other place of business, is there any law against that?
Quite apart from the legal and ethical objections that might arise against doing this, I'm sure some business owners are not above giving in to the temptation to spy on their patrons, especially if there's a big profit motive (like getting access to inside information by spying on Wall St execs gossiping over drinks or dinner).
That's not to mention dirt that might be revealed in conversations considered to be "private", which could be used to blackmail people or for other nefarious purposes.
The technology to perform such spying has been around for a long time, and in a bar or restaurant the owner (or rogue employee, or customer even) wouldn't have to resort to exotic techniques such as this light bulb trick. A simple microphone would suffice.
In a few select Houston strip clubs.. all the time, or at least ten years ago some did, the ones owned by certain organizations. I haven’t been around that scene for a decade, so I can’t speak to now. I know of a few other places that seemed to magically never have trouble with city officials or permitting. Another such place, an after hours club, was frequented by the mayor’s “party-oriented” daughter, never had trouble with police raids, or fire marshals. The venue survived unscathed until the next mayor took over and such leverage became unavailable. The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission was the only real challenge, but often the local cops would be knowledgeable about pending raids and would graciously provide some advance notice. It certainly helped that many of those cops were paid as off duty private security by the venue. DEA was another frequent adversary, but those folks aren’t as undercover as they thought they were. I might suggest that the DEA was (or maybe still is,) one of the more sketchy law enforcement agencies in the government.
Just under the surface of “normal,” there is some really fascinating stuff that goes on.
It is not public because there is a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Your device might have its microphone disabled, in hardware even, but I wonder if the ambient light sensor has enough gain to see audio frequency variations in room lighting. We already know hard drives and speakers and whatever else can act like mics for exfiltration...
Re-creating CRT images through walls, listening in on keystrokes through the electric wires of a building or learning about traffic patterns while observing network interface flashing LEDs.
Just a fascinating world when you leave aside what they are aimed towards.
By the end of the decade or beginning of the next, we had telecom hardware companies filtering the signal to the activity LED so that you couldn't read packet info out of the flickering.
Odds are good that someone combined those ideas a lot earlier than we might like to think.
I’m much less worried about spies than I am about the powers directly around me, namely my own state and the large corporations that run society.
I have no clue who greenlit this article but it seems starved for context not spoon-fed by the research team itself.
But yet, that can be picked up 25m away by a telescope? With equipment that costs less than $1000? No way.
Sounds like some phony story to me, that's meant to make us think spies have superpowers, or even that we're all being spied on. (Which we are, but not like this.)
If you think that actual government agency cannot do even more easily with better equipment in 2020 you're kidding yourself.
Do you seriously think that you have been provided evidence in that video? All that happened is that I ended up looking at a leaf and packets of things that weren't moving at all. That's not evidence!
It says that they are picking up vibrations from a leaf or bag of crisps. But they don't show you those vibrations. They just give you a bunch of graphics and fuzzy sounds and tell you that they have done something.
You do see that this is could be very simple video trickery right? As with the initial article - there's a claim, but nothing to really be able to use to verify that claim. Just a graphic, and references to Shazam. Perhaps this is guerrilla marketing for Shazam? Its a more viable thesis anyway, given the evidence!
Firstly, note that it provides no evidence. It has a claim, and shows a fancy graphic. That's it. Its not evidence. Anyone can make that sort of thing up. How can one differentiate this from a story I just made up?
Digging in, it says: "LED bulbs also offer a signal-to-noise ratio that's about 6.3 times that of an incandescent bulb and 70 times a fluorescent one."
Why? Why are LEDs better for this noise reflection stuff, than incandescent or fluorescent ones? They're all in glass. The heat of the glass is stable. The LED itself surely can't help.
Why does Shazam feature in these tests, at all?!
It also says: "Researchers have known for years that a laser bounced off a target's window can allow spies to pick up the sounds inside. Another group of researchers showed in 2014 that the gyroscope of a compromised smartphone can pick up sounds even if the malware can't access its microphone."
Right. Are we meant to believe that this is what spies do? I mean, a spy just has to access whatever systems are already at his or her disposal and listen to your calls. They don't need to do any of that!
And: "Still, Nassi says the researchers are publishing their findings not to enable spies or law enforcement, but to make clear to those on both sides of surveillance what's possible. "We want to raise the awareness of this kind of attack vector," he says. "We’re not in the game of providing tools.""
So, they even say that this article is about raising awareness of this kind of attack vector. They are raising awareness. Thanks spies!
The article is a joke. At best this is a puff piece for a spy agency, or more likely just to increase paranoid awareness amongst those in tech. Be scared, danger everywhere! There are spy agencies listening to you everywhere - they're not using your phone, they use light bulbs and leaves!!
perhaps domestically, but certainly not in a foreign country.
>So, they even say that this article is about raising awareness of this kind of attack vector. They are raising awareness. Thanks spies!
I'm not sure what you're are trying to say here. Does this discredit the article?
I think we should demand more. We are being presented science right? We should be able to recognise that this article and the videos, etc are just presenting a claim. They are not providing any evidence. This is just a story.
You're saying that I should use tools to replicate the experiment. Great - this is what we should do before we accept something as true. Otherwise, we are in the realms of 'belief'.
So, do you believe this story? And did you do due diligence, and confirm with the tools that it is true? Or did you skip that bit and believe it despite the fact that NO evidence is presented at all? Be honest when you answer please!
Stepping back a bit, I'm not saying anything so drastic. I certainly don't see why I'm being downvoted. I'm really talking about applying the scientific method personally. I'm saying don't accept articles, videos by default, without even critically reading what is being presented. I really think its pretty obvious stuff, tbh!
I suspect that alarm bells wouldn't ring at all....
I don't see any movement on my computer speakers or mic when they're emitting or receiving sound, but they wouldn't function if vibration wasn't happening. You can measure the vibrations from a short distance away with a laser setup that costs about $300 IIRC.
So the basic concept is sound. After that it's just a question of what kind of measurement setup a government agency with absurd amounts of time and money could cook up.