Hard Drive of Hearing - Disks that Eavesdrop with a Synthesized Microphone

Explore a groundbreaking security research presentation that unveils how magnetic hard disk drives can be exploited as unintentional microphones, capable of extracting and parsing human speech with surprising accuracy. Delve into the innovative proof-of-concept attack demonstrating the potential for privacy invasion through non-traditional sensors. Learn about the challenges, threat model, and technical aspects of this cyberphysical attack surface, including sampling rates, spectrograms, and audio quality assessments. Discover the implications of this research, including the ability for extracted audio to be recognized by services like Shazam. Gain insights into potential defense mechanisms, such as ultrasonic aliasing, to mitigate acoustic eavesdropping risks posed by these synthesized microphones in hard disk drives.

Introduction
Challenges
Threat Model
Root Access
Why not a builtin microphone
How hard drives work
Similarities
Proof of Concept
Sampling Rate
Spectrogram
Setup
Noise
Harvard Sentence
PSQ MOS
Audio Sample
Shazam
Results
Potential Improvements
Conclusion