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Spying with Your Robot Vacuum Cleaner: Eavesdropping via Lidar Sensors [pdf]
- esel2k 6y agoIn reality though I never have my lidar robotvac running when I am at home. Even less having a conversation as all robotvac are loud. I personally would be still more concern about all voice activate device (alexa etc).
- joegaudet 6y agoIsn't the implication that someone has already compromised the robot? So it wouldn't be running necessarily?
- 1-6 6y agoHuman maid vs robot vacuum cleaner... I'd take my chances with the robot.
- whatshisface 6y agoVs. pushing a Dyson around.
- silentsea90 6y agoHuman maid in the western world costs real $$$
- corobo 6y agoTo be fair so does the robot
- sagarpatil 6y agoNot in Indian subcontinent. I pay my maid $160/month to clean, mop, cook and wash utensils. A roborock costs $550.
- denysvitali 6y agoIf only my Roomba was that smart, I wouldn't probably worry about eavesdropping: right now it can barely clean my floor and lock himself in the bathroom forever. Jokes aside, which Robot Vacuum Cleaner is equiped with a LIDAR? So far the only ones that I've seen barely have a proximity sensor, fall sensor and IR sensors . It could be that I've only bought and seen the cheapest versions though.
- baldeagle 6y agoWyze just started to promote one. https://www.geekwire.com/2020/wyze-releasing-199-robot-vacuum-clean-competitors-evolving-smart-home/ https://www.geekwire.com/2020/wyze-releasing-199-robot-vacuu...
- denysvitali 6y agoLooks cool! Do you know by any chance who are they selling the floor map data to?
- baldeagle 6y agoIf their ops sec doesn't get any better, they may just give them away. https://www.geekwire.com/2019/wyze-data-leak-key-takeaways-server-mistake-exposed-information-2-4m-customers/ https://www.geekwire.com/2019/wyze-data-leak-key-takeaways-s...
- dawnerd 6y agoRoborock are really nice and not that expensive. I've actually been really impressed with just how well it maps the floors. The other day I had to clean some cat fur out of it mid cycle, placed it in a totally different part of the room that wasn't in sight of the dock and it was able to fairly quickly figure out where it was.
- piyh 6y agoI bought an S50 from China and it constantly errors out on carpet. It seems to be a common thing, I guess China doesn't do full carpet like we have in the US so it's something they didn't test for on my version. The lidar is impressive though. Cleans way faster since it's taking efficient paths.
- ramses0 6y agoThe "Evil Maid" class of attacks have a new vector: "Evil Digital Maid/Butler" (assume pervasive, fully compromised electronic assistants). iPhone "Evil Maid" => GPS, Mic, Camera, Digital User Impersonation [post social network messages, iMessage, etc.] HomePod "Evil Butler" => Control HomeKit, Mic, Playback Arbitrary Recordings [freeze, this is the police, etc., impersonate a significant other] Roomba "Evil Maid" => Lidar (mm-resolution depth-camera?!?), Virtual Mic, Push/Close Doors, Push/Move Objects [tip over a table w/ candle] WiFi Cams "Evil Maid" => Camera, sometimes speakers, sometimes motion control ...if this is how the robot uprising begins, we're a long way from Terminators / SkyNet, but easy to see entire classes of vulnerabilities which are pretty obvious in retrospect. If you haven't seen "Enemy of the State" or "Conspiracy Theory", they're great movies with a similar premise: "What if 'the system' turned against you?"
- germinalphrase 6y agoI would also recommend “The Conversation” (1974). Not because the vision of surveillance is up to date, but because it’s a much better movie and (sort of) prequel to “Enemy of the State”.
- staunch 6y agoThis is why I make sure to whisper when entering my 2FA codes.
- kazinator 6y agoThis is stupid; if I'm going to be able to sneak an entire robot vacuum cleaner into the victim's environment, I'm putting an actual microphone and even camera in there, and not messing around with LIDAR bouncing off vibrating paper cups.
- fmntf 6y agoThe attack presented in the paper replace only the software without hardware intervention. It requires someone to MITM the robot update service, and that's not impossibile considering that someone still delivery software updates via HTTP.
- function_seven 6y agoThe scenario does not involve "sneaking" in a robot vacuum. It's just another attack vector to pursue when looking to bug a target. Maybe you can't get a 0-day on their Alexas or their Nests, but you do have one for their vacuum. You remotely update the firmware on the vacuum to exfiltrate the sound that way. Most people didn't realize that the :visited selector represented a danger until someone figured out how to get your browsing history by abusing it.
- Zenbit_UX 6y agoHN Bingo: Commenter doesn't recognize an obvious joke and responds seriously.
- qwertox 6y agoWho says you get to put a microphone and a camera in there? You work with what you have. Ideally you'd have a microphone, but maybe that robot vacuum cleaner of your target doesn't have one. And maybe you also don't have access to other devices which have one. But, TBH, I wouldn't be surprised if today's vacuum cleaners have a microphone in them. "For voice commands", you know? Recently I bought another TP-Link HS110 Wifi Plug, and while working on reading it automatically every couple of seconds with a Python script, I noticed that a response contained a field labeled "mic_type":"IOT.SMARTPLUGSWITCH". "mic_type"? Some time ago the German router producer "AVM" had to explain why their DECT smart-plugs had a microphone in them.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tim-fan 6y agoIf you're playing around with this, it might help to be root on the vacuum. https://github.com/dgiese/dustcloud https://github.com/dgiese/dustcloud
- frizensami 6y agoYes, this is really cool project that we used in the paper as well!
- Tepix 6y agoIt's mentioned in the linked paper at the top of page 7. You must have missed it. Or perhaps you didn't read it completely ;-)
- aaron695 6y agoHere's a clearer photo of the setup - https://umd.app.box.com/s/7qkltjg5xs6cpbjllu8fajpelbs736cm https://umd.app.box.com/s/7qkltjg5xs6cpbjllu8fajpelbs736cm It's interesting work. It's a kinda like finding a really weak seemingly impossible to use buffer overflow and now someone has to weaponize it and put it into easy to use metasploit to become just one of 1000s of things to have available. Personally I'm surprised all these robots don't have microphones yet. Not being able to talk to robots makes them pretty lame.
- frizensami 6y agoHi, first author of the paper here. We also consider this as part of the increasing arsenal of smart-home attacks, which can be opportunistic and long-term. Also given that it's an offline attack, as signal processing / machine learning methods improve, perhaps the lidars signals an attacker collects could eventually become intelligible audio. I was also surprised that they don't have microphones. I guess the developers would prefer to have that on the companion app instead.
- frizensami 6y agoHello all, I'm Sriram, the first author of this paper. We were inspired by the idea of laser microphones as an audio eavesdropping vector, and tried to find a way to use LIDARs similarly, even though they're not designed for this purpose at all. In the near future, what I think is scarier is the possibility of executing the same attack through self-driving cars LIDARs. Perhaps this would allow attackers to spy on conversations in cars that are driving beside you or stationary next to you at traffic lights.
- suifbwish 6y agoWhat materials did you find were most difficult to perform this attack on? I am guessing material like wood or rubber does not vibrate enough to observe a pattern? Also wouldn’t you be able to prevent this attack by having audio generators that generate near random audio signals that mask the data the attacker is seeking?
- frizensami 6y agoRight, good question. Anything that is very rigid and heavy doesn't vibrate enough when we play sound near it. I would say it's more about the thickness and weight of the target object than the material itself. For example, a very thin piece of wood would work much better than a wooden table leg. In the paper we actually test against ten different objects that are likely to be within reach of the robot vacuum cleaner. The difficulty with masking this attack is that you need audio playing at a comparable volume near to the legitimate speech sources, which might be pretty disruptive. In the case of background white noise generators, for legitimate audio playing at around 70 dB SPL, we don't lose much accuracy until the background white noise exceeds 75 dB SPL.
- suifbwish 6y agoVery interesting. All the new phones have lidar built in that works up to 30 feet away. In theory with the technology you applied here, it would be possible for them to eavesdrop without a microphone.This is almost as unsettling as the cameras that can visualize WiFi reflecting off human skin through walls. Its a matter of time before a commercial model hits the market. https://youtu.be/fGZzNZnYIHo https://youtu.be/fGZzNZnYIHo what a brave new world we are about to live in.
- pabs3 6y agoThis reminds me of the LibreRVAC project: https://librervac.org/ https://librervac.org/
- Nirali_Feige 6y agoTerrifying when you think of the implications this has on self driving cars and the latest smartphones.
- vaccinator 6y agosmartphones have some sensors that are more useful to the ad company then myself
- Tepix 6y agoGiven that these vacuums also have a speaker, could that be used as a microphone as well?
- frizensami 6y agoI believe there is previous work that re-wires / re-purposes speakers to be used as microphones. However, my understanding is that this requires the hardware itself to be modified.