- A new exploit called 'Mic-E-Mouse' has been revealed
- It picks up acoustic vibrations in a desk via the high-sensitivity sensor in a gaming mouse
- Those vibrations are put through signal processing, and AI is then used to make the results largely audible
Is your mouse spying on you? No, it almost certainly isn't, but the peripheral could feasibly be corrupted to perform surveillance duties on an unsuspecting PC gamer based on the findings of a new research paper.
TweakTown spotted a paper (authored by researchers from the University of California) which shows how some of the best gaming mice out there can be compromised via malware that uses signal processing and AI called 'Mic-E-Mouse' (because it gives the mouse a pair of big ears, essentially).
Why is this about gaming mice? Because these are the types of mice that these days have staggeringly high levels of sensitivity (DPI), and that's what's needed to facilitate the exploit the researchers have found.
The compromise is leveraged via the acoustic vibrations in a surface, such as a desk, that the mouse is being used on. When you speak, that creates very slight vibrations in the desk, and believe it or not, a sufficiently sensitive mouse can pick up those vibrations.
Mic-E-Mouse records the vibrations, and although the raw noise isn't useful itself, when the audio is run through a signal processing system (Wiener filtering) and then enhanced by AI, the end result is comprehensible.
You can check out the results in the YouTube video below, and although the recorded voice sounds heavily digitized, it's audible enough - worryingly so. The researchers claim the system has a "speaker-recognition accuracy of 80%", so while the exploiter may not catch every word, it's likely they'll be able to understand what's being said.
What isn't made clear is what effect a mouse mat might have on the surveillance equation here, particularly a thicker pad.
Analysis: mic drop
So, what would be needed for you to fall victim to a surveillance sting run off your gaming mouse? You'd need to be using a high sensitivity mouse (above 20,000 DPI), but as the researchers point out, those kinds of peripherals can be had cheaply these days – and so are becoming increasingly widespread.
Obviously, you would also need to have your PC compromised by malware carrying Mic-E-Mouse, whether the exploit is delivered via an actual piece of software installed on your system, or a web-based attack. Whatever the case, you would have to fall into a trap that'd sneak Mic-E-Mouse onto your PC.
Clearly this is a worrying development given the seeming accuracy with which even a relatively cheap gaming mouse can be used to decipher what's being said at a PC via Mic-E-Mouse.
As ever, though, if you practice good online safety habits (have a read of this article by a hacker too), and keep yourself armed with a top-notch antivirus, you're unlikely to be hit by a threat like this – and certainly not yet, since it's still early days for this particular exploit. Typically, an attack such as this would be more suited to being aimed at the business world - trying to eavesdrop on corporate secrets and the like - but given that it requires a high sensitivity gaming mouse, this runs against that idea.
Naturally, this isn't the first mouse-related exploit we've seen aired, and doubtless it won't be the last.
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