Hardware Security Switch for Speakers and Gyro

[whysperer]

I feel like this should be added to the design if the focus is on privacy and security. From my understanding, speakers can be turned into microphones through software and so can the gyroscope (to a MUCH lesser extent). I only found out about this stuff recently, but I think research was done on this back in 2014, if I recall correctly.

[wibble]

References? They'd be useful in assessing how much of a risk this really is. Also we don't have a hardware switch for the microphone yet, so an attacker could just use that directly.

I suspect there are some specific hardware requirements to use a speaker as a microphone, so you'd need to check whether it's an actual risk in this case.

Accels have been used as a side channel for touchscreen inference, so using gyros and magnetometers as a side channel is plausible:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...martphones

[fsflover]

Although if it's probably hard to turn speakers into microphones, one can leak data using speakers as they are: https://github.com/romanz/amodem/.

[daniel]

Very interesting. HOwever, it is really a threat? I have no idea of this, and I just searched. All I found it needs physical manipulation.