research-article

Listening through a Vibration Motor

Authors:

Romit Roy ChoudhuryAuthors Info & Claims

MobiSys '16: Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

Pages 57 - 69

https://doi.org/10.1145/2906388.2906415

Published: 20 June 2016 Publication History

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of using the vibration motor in mobile devices as a sound sensor, almost like a microphone. We show that the vibrating mass inside the motor -- designed to oscillate to changing magnetic fields -- also responds to air vibrations from nearby sounds. With appropriate processing, the responses become intelligible, to the extent that humans can understand the vibra-motor recorded words with greater than 80% average accuracy. Even off-the-shelf speech recognition softwares are able to decode at 60% accuracy, without any training or machine learning. We present our overall techniques and results through a system called VibraPhone, and discuss implications to both sensing and security.

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Cited By

Zhang GFu HXiang ZZhou XHu PCheng XYang Y(2025)Ambient Light Reflection-Based Eavesdropping Enhanced With cGANIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.346039224:1(72-85)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2024.3460392
Chen TYang YQiu CFan XGuo XShangguan LOkoshi TKo JLiKamWa R(2024)Enabling Hands-Free Voice Assistant Activation on EarphonesProceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services10.1145/3643832.3661890(155-168)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643832.3661890
Liao QHuang YHuang YWu K(2024)An Eavesdropping System Based on Magnetic Side-Channel Signals Leaked by SpeakersACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/363706320:2(1-30)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2024
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Index Terms

Listening through a Vibration Motor
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Ubiquitous and mobile computing
    1. Ubiquitous and mobile computing systems and tools

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cover image ACM Conferences

MobiSys '16: Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

June 2016

440 pages

ISBN:9781450342698

DOI:10.1145/2906388

General Chairs:
Rajesh Balan
Singapore Management University
,
Archan Misra
Singapore Management University
,
Program Chairs:
Sharad Agarwal
Microsoft
,
Cecilia Mascolo
University of Cambridge

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGMOBILE: ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing

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SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 20 June 2016

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NSF
Huawei
Qualcomm
HP

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MobiSys'16

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SIGMOBILE

MobiSys'16: The 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

June 26 - 30, 2016

Singapore, Singapore

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MobiSys '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 31 of 197 submissions, 16%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 274 of 1,679 submissions, 16%

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Cited By

Zhang GFu HXiang ZZhou XHu PCheng XYang Y(2025)Ambient Light Reflection-Based Eavesdropping Enhanced With cGANIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.346039224:1(72-85)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2024.3460392
Chen TYang YQiu CFan XGuo XShangguan LOkoshi TKo JLiKamWa R(2024)Enabling Hands-Free Voice Assistant Activation on EarphonesProceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services10.1145/3643832.3661890(155-168)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643832.3661890
Liao QHuang YHuang YWu K(2024)An Eavesdropping System Based on Magnetic Side-Channel Signals Leaked by SpeakersACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/363706320:2(1-30)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637063
Hu PLi WMa YSanthalingam PPathak PLi HZhang HZhang GCheng XMohapatra P(2024)Towards Unconstrained Vocabulary Eavesdropping With mmWave Radar Using GANIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2022.322669023:1(941-954)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2022.3226690
Lin FWang CLiu TLiu ZShen YBa ZLu LXu WRen K(2024)High-Quality Speech Recovery Through Soundproof Protections via mmWave SensingIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2023.332229521:4(3065-3081)Online publication date: Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2023.3322295
Zhang GXiang ZFu HYang YHu P(2024)EchoLight: Sound Eavesdropping based on Ambient Light ReflectionIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621338(341-350)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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Xu XChen YLing ZLu LLuo JFu X(2024)mmEar: Push the Limit of COTS mmWave Eavesdropping on HeadphonesIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621229(351-360)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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Chen YLi WCheng XHu P(2024)A survey of acoustic eavesdropping attacks: Principle, methods, and progressHigh-Confidence Computing10.1016/j.hcc.2024.1002414:4(100241)Online publication date: Dec-2024
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3581791.3596862
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