Summary
Robot vacuum cleaners can be used by hackers to 'spy' on private conversations: NUS study
Dec 07, 2020 | 🚀 Fathership
SINGAPORE: Your robot vacuum cleaner could be picking up private conversations along with the dust and dirt in your home.
Computer scientists from the National University of Singapore have demonstrated how a common robot vacuum cleaner and its built-in light detection and ranging sensor could be used to "Spy" on private conversations, the university said on Monday.
The method, called LidarPhone, repurposes the Lidar sensor that a robot vacuum cleaner normally uses for navigating around a home into a laser-based microphone to eavesdrop on private conversations.
In their experiments, the researchers used a common robot vacuum cleaner with two sources of sound - the voice of a person reading out numbers played from a computer speaker and music clips from television shows played through a television soundbar.
INTERNET CONNECTED DEVICES POSE PRIVACY RISKS. To prevent Lidars from being misused, people with robot vacuum cleaners are advised to not connect them to the Internet.
Computer scientists from the National University of Singapore have demonstrated how a common robot vacuum cleaner and its built-in light detection and ranging sensor could be used to "Spy" on private conversations, the university said on Monday.
The method, called LidarPhone, repurposes the Lidar sensor that a robot vacuum cleaner normally uses for navigating around a home into a laser-based microphone to eavesdrop on private conversations.
In their experiments, the researchers used a common robot vacuum cleaner with two sources of sound - the voice of a person reading out numbers played from a computer speaker and music clips from television shows played through a television soundbar.
INTERNET CONNECTED DEVICES POSE PRIVACY RISKS. To prevent Lidars from being misused, people with robot vacuum cleaners are advised to not connect them to the Internet.
