This hack is more cool than scary, but it shows how hard it is to anticipate every security flaw in our increasingly complex devices.
A University of Michigan researcher points a speaker at an accelerometer, which can send false readings to a phone, fitness tracker or other device.
Did you hear that? Your phone could be hacked with sound waves.
Researchers at the University of Michigan released a paper Tuesday ( PDF ) explaining how audio tones can send false readings to devices through the devices’ accelerometers. Accelerometers are those sensors in phones, fitness trackers, and tons of other tech toys that tell our devices where they are in space. Any device with an accelerometer could potentially be vulnerable to this kind of hacking attack.
University of Michigan researcher Timothy Trippel said our devices rely on their sensors just like we rely on our ears, eyes and noses. Sending confusing information to those sensors can wreak havoc.
« If autonomous systems can’t trust their senses, then the security and reliability of those systems will fail, » Trippel said in a statement.
Sound wave attacks aren’t new — researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have crashed quadcopter drones with a similar approach , for example ( here’s a video ).
