"Robot Vacuum Cleaners Can Spy on Private Conversations"
A team of computer scientists from the National University of Singapore demonstrated how robot vacuum cleaners could be used to eavesdrop on private conversations using built-in LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors. They used a new method, called LidarPhone, which turns the LIDAR sensor into a laser-based microphone to capture speech. Using the LidarPhone method, the team was able to collect more than 19 hours of recorded audio files. Applied signal processing and deep learning algorithms were then applied to recover speech or identify musical sequences. Sensitive information such as a victim's credit card or bank account number could be picked up, as the system detects digits when they have been spoken aloud. According to the researchers, speech can be recovered at an accuracy rate of 91% using the LidarPhone method. This article continues to discuss how the LidarPhone attack technique works, the prevention of such attacks, and the future application of ideas learned from the LidarPhone method to autonomous vehicles.