Laser-Based Audio Injection Attacks on Voice-Controllable Systems [pdf]

https://lightcommands.com/20191104-Light-Commands.pdf

by SirLJ • 7 years ago

218 107 7 years ago

sp3323• 7 years ago

This is a cool attack, but I'm not sure where you got "$14" from. The laser pointers were $18 for a pack of 3, but you need a separate laser driver like the $300 one the authors used, and probably an audio amplifier as well.

There are some videos of the attack at https://lightcommands.com/

ron0c• 7 years ago

Exactly. Title says "$14" and then show this as the setup: https://i.imgur.com/SYUSIDs.png

phailhaus• 7 years ago

"Google Assistant can be hijacked by a $2 pack of screws!"

knowaveragejoe• 7 years ago

If you scroll further down, they show a significantly cheaper setup.

dkonofalski• 7 years ago

So your typical Reddit/Hacker News new computer build.

"$300 for the whole thing. (Note: This doesn't include the GPU, motherboard, case, or monitor that I already had prior to building.)"

thsowers• 7 years ago

Agree, title should be more like "Light Commands: Laser-Based Audio Injection Attacks on Voice-Controllable Systems"

Someone1234• 7 years ago

Particularly as this isn't exclusive to smart assistants. They found the same could be used against phones and tablets (as slightly higher power due to the lower sensitivity of the microphones).

hanniabu• 7 years ago

I foresee a market for decorative chotskies with open centers that sit over the mic to prevent these peripheral attacks.

eeZah7Ux4• 7 years ago

Modulating a laser at audio frequencies is pretty trivial.

You can probably inject the signal straight from the headphone output of a smartphone into the right pad in the laser pointer with a decoupling resistor and inline capacitor.

...if you don't care about audio quality and longevity of the laser.

http://www.yak.net/fqa/229.html

kordlessagain• 7 years ago

Clickbait PDF

thih9• 7 years ago

To be fair, the PDF's title is different, "Light Commands: Laser-Based Audio Injection Attacks on Voice-Controllable Systems".

Maybe we should change this submission's title to the PDF's title.

brudgers• 7 years ago

Stipulating that $14 might be off by as much as two orders of magnitude, cost remains an insignificant barrier for any adversary with access to a credit card.

dang• 7 years ago

We changed the title from "Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa can be hijacked with $14 laser pointer".

Submitters: please don't editorialize like that. It breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

exabrial• 7 years ago

I don't understand why anyone wants these listening devices in their home

travbrack• 7 years ago

There's already one in your pocket

temp2206• 7 years ago

Also I believe it will move towards a voice free AI determined system. Because at some point in future decision making will be the toughest activity. (Currently moving and switching on buttons is)

sp3323• 7 years ago

The ads make them look cool. Amazon puts them at the top of the site so it looks like they're popular and everyone wants one. The industrial design makes them super unobtrusive, and the cheerful voice comes off as ultra benign.

lostgame4• 7 years ago

Okay, but they’re still the largest global privacy violation technology in history...you couldn’t pay me to have one of these in my home, and I mean; a lot - you could offer me cash every month to keep this in my house and I would still say no.

These devices are as literally Big Brother as it gets.

I personally boycott Google products and do not purchase from Amazon. Google has gone from ‘don’t be evil’ to ‘be evil and pretend we’re still cool’.

kiseleon• 7 years ago

For me it is because when I am home I don't want to have to use my phone. I want to spend time with my family.

Every time I pull out my phone there is the temptation to check my email, message friends, etc.

But with my echo dot (or google home mini, I currently have both while I decide which to keep) I can control my lights by voice without missing a beat, I can play music for my kids to dance to without fumbling through an app, I can check the weather forecast while I'm digging through the coat closet, all without being distracted from what I'm doing and without any extra fluff.

I do not have any locks or security systems connected to them as I do not trust them that far, but for informational and recreational use they have made things considerably more convenient.

ouid2• 7 years ago

how does not wanting to use your phone have anything to do with using a listening device to turn off your lights?

sparrish• 7 years ago

Cause my kids need help spelling and I really suck at it.

engineer_222• 7 years ago

Don't worry, neurodiversity is trending

ryandvm• 7 years ago

Do you really not understand or are you just not accepting the same answers everyone gives every time this question comes up?

They're terribly useful for listening to music, setting timers, alarms, reminders, checking weather, traffic, unit conversions, and just general web lookups.

I suspect what you meant was, "why do people trade their privacy for convenience?" Which of course is ALWAYS the trade-off one makes when it comes to security.

I personally have decided (for now) that the convenience of the devices outweighs the likely harm they will have on me. Would I have one if I were running for political office? Absolutely not.

satokema_work• 7 years ago

It's weird that I manage to do that entire list of things without saying a word aloud.

It's luxury tech. That's where the market is.

nimajneb2• 7 years ago

I use mine to check the weather every morning and frequently listen to the news feature. As well as music during the day sometimes. I love them :) I think other people are just obtuse or paranoid about surveillance.

babuskov• 7 years ago

They're terribly useful for listening to music, setting timers, alarms, reminders, checking weather, traffic, unit conversions, and just general web lookups.

In short: it enables people to get even more lazy. No wonder US has an obesity problem.

eeZah7Ux4• 7 years ago

Most of the security and privacy concerns come from not bothering to press few buttons on a smartphone.

A smartphone that would be in your hands or pockets anyways.

cbsmith• 7 years ago

Yeah, this explains why they've been integrated into every high end headset. ;-)

roywiggins• 7 years ago

I use mine as a glorified internet radio. My grandparents use it as a glorified Clapper(tm) to switch room lights on and off.

If you can find a standalone internet radio that's as convenient as an Amazon Echo, please let me know. It's an underserved market.

gwbas1c• 7 years ago

I find voice controls so frustrating that I don't see the appeal.

Maybe once "okay google" works correctly on my phone, I'll start using one of these.

fpgaminer• 7 years ago

I don't know if the authors mention it, but it seems like you could combine this with the vishing attack (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21306612) by using silent light commands to get a malicious app installed.

Fun stuff...

dantle2• 7 years ago

I'm a bit surprised that this works. It appears that this attack targets a single microphone. However, internal to most of these home assistant devices (e.g. Echo or HomePod) there is an array of microphones. A real sound from a spoken word would probably show up on more than one microphone (with an appropriate time and phase offset), although it seems to not be currently required. It seems like it would be complex or impossible for an attacker to target more than one microphone with this attack.

MauranKilom2• 7 years ago

This is covered in the paper. They acknowledge this defense technique while also pointing out that a laser flashlight could be used to illuminate all microphones at once.

penagwin• 7 years ago

The power output would need to be much higher and I'm not sure it'd work as well through glass, I'm thinking something more like multiple lasers?

rmsaksida• 7 years ago

What about internal microphones?

dantle2• 7 years ago

Perhaps the "all at once" attack could work against today's hardware. This is because the mics (in devices I know of) are co-planar and the user may be speaking to Alexa (or whoever) from directly above or below the device. In this configuration, it is valid for all mics to be receiving the same audio signal simultaneously.

But in some future rev, one could imagine that if the mics in the array are non-coplanar (e.g. at least 4 mics) and sufficiently far from each other, then there is no possible way for the audio signal to reach them at once (unless it is actually light being measured).

gok2• 7 years ago

You could require a signal from >1 microphone, but then that would make the system less reliable if any of the mics were occluded. And this would be to prevent an attack which is kind of ridiculous in the first place.

smolsky• 7 years ago

For the ones too lazy to RTFA:

VIII. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

In this paper we presented LightCommands , which is an attack that uses light to inject commands into voice-controllable systems from large distances. To mount the attack, an attacker transmits light modulated with an audio signal, which is converted back to the original audio signal within a microphone. We demonstrated LightCommands on many commercially available voice-controllable systems that use Siri, Portal, Google Assistant, and Alexa, obtaining successful command injections at a maximum distance of more than 100 meters while penetrating clear glass windows. Next, we highlight deficiencies in the security of voice-controllable systems, which leads to additional compromises of third-party hardware such as locks and cars. Better understanding of the physics behind the attack will benefit both new attacks and countermeasures. In particular, we can possibly use the same principle to mount other acoustic injection attacks (e.g., on motion sensors) using light. In addition, heating by laser can also be an effective way of injecting false signals to sensors.

blhack• 7 years ago

Man this is such a great hack. This reminds me of the old TEMPEST attacks against CRT monitors from the 90s.

Cool stuff!

zbs7• 7 years ago

They made a simplified video explanation here: http://youtu.be/ORji7Tz5GiI

prima-facie• 7 years ago

According to their website the Google Home mini, the one with the cloth mesh top, is surprisingly one of the most resilient to this type of attack, being limited to about 20m in ideal conditions(1).

It's also one of the cheapest voice controlled home assistant devices, being given away by Spotify, Google and others on special promotions.

(1) https://lightcommands.com/

adamch2• 7 years ago

This is cool research, but I hope people aren't viewing this as a real-world worry. By the time someone is breaking into my house to set up hundreds of dollars worth of laser equipment, I probably have bigger problems.

CraneWorm• 7 years ago

They triggered the device from across the street.

blakes• 7 years ago

If you'd actually read the paper, you can see that they were able to inject commands through double pane glass from 75 meters away.

adamch2• 7 years ago

I know, but I have a fence around my house. Once someone is setting up equipment around my house, why not just smash a window and steal my stuff directly?

adimitrov• 7 years ago

For this attack nobody needs to break into your home. It can be executed from a distance (100m) and through "clear glass windows."

Upvoter33• 7 years ago

and, the attack may be "open the front door / garage door" ...

eeZah7Ux4• 7 years ago

The hardware can be much cheaper. Furthermore, stealing very expensive cars would pay off the cost very quickly.

stefan_• 7 years ago

Huh? I mean we have seen the WiFi person detection hacks through walls that need a lot of calibration, careful setup and so on, but this was pretty straightforward. Modulate your sound signal onto the laser current and it reproduced more or less directly.

w-m• 7 years ago

I really liked their take on the countermeasures: "It is possible to reduce the amount of light reaching the microphone’s diaphragm using a barrier that physically blocks straight light beams [...] However, we note that such physical barriers are only effective to a certain point, as an attacker can always increase the laser power in an attempt to compensate for the cover-induced attenuation. Finally, in case such compensation is not possible, the attacker can always use the laser to burn through barriers, creating his own light path."

Sure, you can try to defend by putting a lid on the microphone. But we already have a laser here, we'll just burn through that.

ilikepi• 7 years ago

I wonder if simply having dirty windows would be a more effective countermeasure. See also "Real Genius".

brianberns2• 7 years ago

If someone is willing to blast your possessions to bits using a laser, I think the security of your smart devices is probably the least of your immediate concerns.

Majromax• 7 years ago

I don't see how that follows? A thief might be willing to break a conventional door lock if it gains them access to high-value, fenceable possessions.

In this hypothetical, the hostile actor isn't interested in the smart speaker itself, they're interested in what the smart speaker can do.

virgil_disgr4ce• 7 years ago

For such a thorough and insightful paper, I wonder if they mean this as a joke. Not even a 1W laser is going to burn through any common, real-world materials at a distance.

gruez• 7 years ago

Can someone explain the mechanism that causes light to translate to electrical signals in the microphone? Is the heat generated moving the diaphragm? Is the microphone photosensitive?

mav3rick• 7 years ago

Kind of related but light can change photo sensitive resistors, which can change current i.e. change electric signal.

Scaevolus• 7 years ago

It's radiation pressure from the pulsed beam of light moving the tiny microphone.

MEMS microphones are tiny capacitors that are vibrated by sounds. In section IV.C of the paper, they test whether the effect is mechanical or photoelectric, and determine that it's acting via mechanical vibrations, since the effect is stopped by gluing the microphone down with a transparent bit of glue.

Think of it as a tiny solar sail-- they're hitting a very small piece of metal with a lot of photons, so even minor deflections are translated effectively.

"The diaphragm is a thin membrane that flexes in response to an acoustic wave. The diaphragm and a fixed back plate work as a parallel-plate capacitor, whose capacitance changes as a consequence of the diaphragm’s mechanical deformations as it responds to alternating sound pressures. Finally, the ASIC die converts the capacitive change to a voltage signal on the output of the microphone."

"As can be seen, the modification decreases the amplitude of the signal detected by the microphone, and the signal after the glue application is less than 10% of the original signal. We thus attribute our light-based signal injection results to mechanical movements of the microphone’s diaphragm, which are in turn translated to output voltage by the microphone’s internal circuitry."

gpm• 7 years ago

Why did they need to focus the laser through a telephoto lens? I thought the whole point of lasers was that they were already focused into a beam that is moving in nearly exactly one direction?

oceliker• 7 years ago

Lasers are collimated [0], not focused. They might be focusing it to maximize light intensity at the required spot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collimated_beam

ryanmercer• 7 years ago

Lasers spread just like a flash light with distance, the ones shined at the mirrors left on the moon by the Apollo missions for example were 6.5 kilometers wide by the time they reached the moon.

Personally I've seen cheap lasers without a good focussing mechanism get house sized at even a few hundred yars, I bought a 1w laser diodes years ago that had no optics to focus it and at a foot it was roughly the size of a dime and absurdly bright and at a few hundred yards the diameter was taller than a door and incredibly dim -we tested it by shining it across a pond at the apartments we were living at one night aiming where there were no windows and immediately turned it off due to the massive size of the dot.

I imagine they were just using what they had on hand to attempt to make a collimating lens/focusing Lens.

If you have a pair of binoculars, go shine a flashlight into them (from both ends) tonight and you'll see that even a cheap optic can drastically change a light source. It's actually a fun little hack for making a searchlight when you're camping, you'll get a considerably brighter spot of light.

tomatotomato37• 7 years ago

Why is everyone more concerned over the ability of someone with too much time and laser modulation equipment telling their smart speaker to order 10 crates of hand sanitizer than the physics & possible new applications of influencing microphones via laser light?

amhokies• 7 years ago

Money is important to people.

Maximus9000• 7 years ago

Because it's about more than just buying stuff. Potentially you could say "Hey Siri, transfer all of my Monero coin to XYZ address".

duxup• 7 years ago

How about telling their smart speaker to complete a task that might be connected to more sensitive things, like unlocking a door, opening a garage door?

rubberfish613• 7 years ago

They also point out they can use this to bypass security and open "smart-locks".. this is slightly more concerning than just buying hand sanitizer.. I wouldn't be caught dead with one of these smart-lock devices, but I have friends who aren't so cautious.

ptasci67• 7 years ago

I have owned several smart locks and every single one has required a secret passcode to actually unlock via a smart assistant. Working backwards, the real threat if they didn't do that is just someone shouting through the window.

txsoftwaredev• 7 years ago

I own a smart lock and my Google home device will only lock the door. You can't ask Google to unlock it.

gnicholas• 7 years ago

I don't use a smart assistant, but I think some people use them with smart locks ("unlock the back door").

oh_sigh• 7 years ago

Alexa doesn't let you unlock, you can only check status and lock it.

kjaftaedi• 7 years ago

The technique of using light to transmit sound has been around for over half a century.. although it's more commonly used as a microphone rather than a speaker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone

A microphone is just a reverse speaker. For example, if you plug your earbuds into an audio input port, you can use them as a microphone.

This is all relatively basic, just not obvious to most people.

jml7c5• 7 years ago

I am not sure it is really as basic and obvious as you imply. The comparison between the "reversibility" of laser speakers/microphones and the reversibility of normal speakers/microphones is a bit off, in my opinion. For starters, laser microphones do not use the photoacoustic effect[1] that the device described relies upon. Whereas the reversibility of normal speakers/microphones is because both devices use the same physical process. That it's possible to build a microphone using lasers and to build a long-range sound generating device using a laser doesn't imply it's obvious (or even possible) to do so for any given audio production or recording technique. E.g., if I can generate audio using a flickering lightbulb, it is not clear that a flickering lightbulb can be used as a microphone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoacoustic_effect

jimrandomh• 7 years ago

Title is editorialized, and in a way that adds incorrect information (the supposed $14 price tag). Mods, the title for this should be "Light Commands: Laser-Based Audio Injection Attacks on Voice-Controllable Systems".

gok2• 7 years ago

The authors seem to a little confused by the purpose of voice identification in these systems. They repeatedly call it "Voice Authentication", which is it not.

kinnth• 7 years ago

Blew my mind!

I always felt all these assistants we're super creepy any way and I get a lot of things hooked up in my smart home but want to control everything via my phone, which I trust.

frankus• 7 years ago

I'm curious if you can use the same effect with human/animal eardrums.

bjt2n3904• 7 years ago

One thought is that the radiation is causing the MEMS sensor to physically vibrate. Part of me wonders how much of this is similar to the way the Raspberry Pi would glitch out when hit with a camera flash.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/xenon-death-flash-a-free-ph...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDfRCi1UV0

dvdvdjdvd2• 7 years ago

Not very similar.

The flash going off gives off strong EMF that induces currents in conductors at relatively low frequency.

The photo-acoustic effect is usually a thermal effect. Material gets rapidly hot from the laser and cools quickly when the laser is turned off.

inetknght• 7 years ago

Discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21444928

zenlibs• 7 years ago

While the attack is technically feasible, complexity and sophistication do not lend this to wide deployment. Someone with a lot of time, money and drive (think heist movie, or spy agency) to hack a person of interest might find this attack viable, assuming they find a line of sight to the mic. But if one's dealing with determined hackers, there is likely a multitude of other lower hanging fruit to first pick off.

darzu• 7 years ago

Hacks always start as "infeasible". But eventually the technique is refined and there's a kit for $20 that can let anyone do it by following simple instructions.

dwoozle• 7 years ago

I forget where I read about a very early and simple attack on Amazon Alexas. Some people knew that their neighbors were going on a long vacation. So they just shouted into their house orders for the Alexa through the front door. They ordered tons of expensive shit on Amazon which was delivered to the front door and then ran off with the packages. The family didn’t get the order confirmation emails from Amazon since they were on a remote trip with no Internet access.

aazaa• 7 years ago

... We thus attribute our light-based signal injection results to mechanical movements of the microphone’s diaphragm, which are in turn translated to output voltage by the microphone’s internal circuitry.

Aside from the security aspect, this is a pretty cool example of applied physics.

The paper doesn't appear to report anything else on this effect, but AFAICT, it's new. The Wired story described two hypotheses, one of which involved the laster heating the air immediately above the microphone, simulating a sound wave as the light amplitude is modulated.

dvdvdjdvd2• 7 years ago

Naw, the photo acoustic effect is a 150 years old

nsxwolf• 7 years ago

I suppose the next generation of MEMS microphones can contain photodiodes to mitigate this attack.

BicepGlue• 7 years ago

This attack method should be dubbed the "Mysteron Attack". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs13rCqfH9k https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Scarlet_and_the_Myster...

Laser-Based Audio Injection Attacks on Voice-Controllable Systems [pdf]

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