Hackers Can Now Use Sound Waves To Take Control Of Your Smartphone

                                             
There's an old mantra in the world that anything can be  hacked, and more complex our devices become, the more methods hackers dream up to break into them.

A team of researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of South Carolina blasted 20 different accelerometers with sound waves from music files. The trick boils down to spoofing capacitive MEMS accelerometers, the chips that enables smartphones to know where they're in motion, where they;re going and how quickly by using a small $5 speaker. The resonant frequencies tricked the sensors in more than half of the accelerometers tested, enabling the researches to do all sorts of stuff.

Capacitive MEMS accelerometers contain a small amount of glass suspended on springs, and the sound waves nudge that piece of mass in such a way that chip thinks it's in motion.

Kevin Fu, an associate of eletrical engineering and omputer science at Michigan University used these sonic cyber attacks to trick smartphone into executing whatever command they wanted. The researchers show in a video how they take over a smartphone app that controls a toy car using nothing but only sound waves while the device remains perfectly still. The team takes so much control over the accelerometers that thay could force a Samsung Galaxy S5 to spell out words in the chip's output signal.

                                 
Along these lines, it is very important to highlight that these experiments are proof-of-concept exercises that exposed serious vulnerabilities in popular consumer hardware. The same kind of  accelerometer technology is used in real cars, drones, aeroplanes, medical devices and other connected devices.

Fu said in a release. "Tomorrow's devices will agressively rely on sensors to make automated decisions with kinetic concequences".

Kanjoos Tech