Smartphones could be used for eavesdropping

Security experts have claimed that the smartphones can be used to spy on you. The new claim is made by a group of researchers from Stanford University along with Rafael, Israel's defense research group. The researchers claimed that gyroscope in smartphones could be used for spying activities.

Smartphones, tablet computers and mobile devices contain gyroscopes that are used for gaming and other apps. The gyroscopes also enable these devices automatically to rotate their screens from a portrait to a landscape view.

In a presentation this week, researchers from Stanford university and Israel’s defense research group Rafael plan to present the technique for using a smartphone to surreptitiously eavesdrop on conversations in a room, essentially converting vibrations detected by the phone’s internal gyroscope into sound that can then be monitored.

Because of gyroscope’s requirement in a handset, it becomes difficult to control how they are used. Apple’s iOS software system and Google’s Android don’t have rules in place that force applications to ask for permission before accessing the gyroscopes on users’ devices.

The researchers used the gyroscopes in the Nexus 4 and Samsung Galaxy S3 phones as well as the Nexus 7 tablet in order to conduct their experiments.

The researchers also offer two suggestions for defending against gyroscope-based eavesdropping: apply low-pass filtering to raw samples provided by the gyroscope, or apply a form of acoustic masking around the gyroscope itself or on a smartphone’s case.

“A general conclusion we suggest following this work is that access to all sensors should be controlled by the permissions framework, possibly differentiating between low and high sampling rates,” according to the researchers.