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Demonstrating Wearable Microphone Jamming

Published: 25 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

We engineered a wearable microphone jammer that is capable of disabling any microphones in the user's surroundings, including hidden microphones. Our device is based on a recent exploit that leverages the fact that when exposed to ultrasonic noise, commodity microphones will leak the noise into the audible range. This allowed us to build a novel wearable microphone jammer that is worn as a bracelet on the user's wrist and jams ubiquitously. We found that our device outperforms state-of-the-art jammers. (1) Existing jammers built from multiple transducers exhibit blind spots, i.e., locations in which transducers destructively interfere and where a microphone cannot be jammed; instead, our wearable jammer leverages natural hand gestures that occur while speaking, gesturing or moving around to blur out blind spots. (2) Existing jammers are directional, requiring users to point the jammer to a microphone; instead, our wearable jams in multiple directions. This is beneficial in that it allows our jammer to even protect against microphones out of sight, such as those hidden behind everyday objects.

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References

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Muhammad Taher Abuelma'atti. 2003. Analysis of the effect of radio frequency interference on the DC performance of bipolar operational amplifiers. IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic compatibility 45, 2 (2003), 453--458.
[2]
Yuxin Chen, Huiying Li, Shan-Yuan Teng, Steven Nagels, Zhijing Li, Pedro Lopes, Ben Y. Zhao, and Haitao Zheng. 2020. Wearable Microphone Jamming. In Proceedings of CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).
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Hidden Microphone dictaphone Bug Recording supressor ultrasonic + Noise Generator by i4 Technology. 2019. https://www.amazon.com/ Microphone-dictaphone-Recording-supressor-ultrasonic/ dp/B01MG4WACJ/. (2019).
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Sapna Maheshwari. 2018. Hey, Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It? New York Times. (March 2018). https: //mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/business/media/ amazon-google-privacy-digital-assistants.html.
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New Generation of High Grade Smartphone Scrambler. 2019. https://www.globaltscmgroup-usa.com/. (2019).
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Nirupam Roy, Haitham Hassanieh, and Romit Roy Choudhury. 2017. Backdoor: Making microphones hear inaudible sounds. In Proceedings of ACM MobiSys.
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Charlie Wood. 2017. Devices sprout ears: What do Alexa and Siri mean for privacy? Christian Science Monitor. (January 2017). https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2017/0114/ Devices-sprout-ears-What-do-Alexa-and-Siri-mean-for-privacy.
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Cited By

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  • (2020)When Speakers Are All Ears: Characterizing Misactivations of IoT Smart SpeakersProceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies10.2478/popets-2020-00722020:4(255-276)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2020

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '20: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2020
4474 pages
ISBN:9781450368193
DOI:10.1145/3334480
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 April 2020

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Author Tags

  1. jamming
  2. microphone
  3. privacy
  4. ultrasound
  5. wearable

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  • National Science Foundation

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CHI '20
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Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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CHI 2025
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 26 - May 1, 2025
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Cited By

View all
  • (2020)When Speakers Are All Ears: Characterizing Misactivations of IoT Smart SpeakersProceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies10.2478/popets-2020-00722020:4(255-276)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2020

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