81–90 of 158 posts
I had a MacGyver moment in the past where I made a phone call with only are pair of old earbuds and a phone cord (no switches, no dial pad).
A speaker is basically the same thing as a microphone in reverse. Normally it takes an electrical signal to move a physical element that creates the sound waves. But you can also move the element and it will generate an electrical signal.
To dial you can use the old rotary trick. The old phones dialed by pulses of quickly disconnecting and reconnecting. You can do that by hand if you want but it might require a little bit of practice and dexterity. Basically if you want to dial a 5, just disconnect the wire from the headphone to the phone cord and then reconnect it 5 times in a row.
You have to both listen and speak through the ear bud. Not the best quality or easiest to do but it works.
The bit you want to know: > Their malware uses a little-known feature of RealTek audio codec chips to silently “retask” the computer’s output channel as an input channel
Reads like a back door to me.
Even if the jacks are color coded or annotated, these day they are actually universal.
So it's more of an accidental backdoor.
The bit you want to know: > Their malware uses a little-known feature of RealTek audio codec chips to silently “retask” the computer’s output channel as an input channel
Reads like a back door to me.
HDAJackRetask from alsa-tools is the tool for this on Linux.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reads like a back door to me.
This feature allows you to plug any audio device (input or output) into any audio jack on the computer and it will JustWorkTM. Even if the jacks are color coded or annotated, these day they are actually universal. So it's more of an accidental backdoor.
The more convenient something is, and the more features it has, the easier it is to hijack it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Headphones also make a really crappy mic -- try it out by plugging them into a microphone jack (essentially what this malware emulates) and recording yourself: you'll need to hold them inches from your mouth to be intelligible. The article itself claims two orders of magnitude better reach: > In their tests, the researchers tried the audio hack with a pair of Sennheiser headphones. They found that they could record…
> with a pair of Sennheiser headphones. And that's where this falls apart. While some people buy quality headphones, many will be using cheap, or rebranded low-quality headphones, like beats, or even no-name headphones.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author of the article intended to write "output-only". But even this is not quite right: it's by definition not an input-only jack, but rather a jack capable of both input and output (which the user may think is output-only), but that RealTek has quietly switched to input mode as a result of their malware. Really this title is alarmist. Only very specific hardware, and you'd have to not notice the sound stopped.
Most people don't play sounds all day. But this does point to a viable defense, if the headphones are always playing something they can't be used to record.
paper: http://cyber.bgu.ac.il/advanced-cyber/system/files/SPEAKE%28... video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez3o8aIZCDM "It’s no surprise that earbuds can function as microphones in a pinch [...] But the researchers took that hack a step further. Their malware [...] silently “retask” the computer’s output channel as an input channel, allowing the malware to record audio even when the headphones remain connected int…
The link to the paper is dead. Is there a mirror? I am very curious to see it
http://cyber.bgu.ac.il/advanced-cyber/system/files/SPEAKEaR....