Hackers can eavesdrop on conversations using ordinary light bulb

LONDON: A new study has revealed that the use of an ordinary light bulb in your room can help hackers to eavesdrop on your conversations.

The study is conducted by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Weizmann Institute of Science. The research talks about a side-channel attack named ‘Lamphone,’ that allows hackers to spy on sound with the help of a remote electro-optical sensor.

This sensor helps analyze a hanging light bulb’s frequency response to sound. Researchers state that Lamphone attack by hackers helps them recover human speech and singing from 25 meters away in case there’s a hanging light bulb somewhere near.

Moreover, human speech can be identified by Google Cloud Speech API, and singing can be identified via Shazam and SoundHound.

The study states that fluctuations in the air pressure on the surface of the hanging bulb cause the bulb to vibrate very slightly which is further exploited by eavesdroppers to recover speech and singing.

To analyze this response of a hanging bulb to the sound, they used an electro-optical sensor and learned how to isolate the audio signal from the optical signal. They also developed an algorithm to recover sound from the optical measurements obtained from the vibrations of a light bulb that was captured by the sensor.