This made me think of The Thing, a fascinating listening device made by the Soviets that was completely passive until powered remotely. Very difficult to detect when unpowered.
The Eye of Sauron paper does acknowledge the limitations that would likely prevent it from working against such a device. Impressive nonetheless. True privacy/security is just very hard!
The speaker in the video was extremely difficult for me to understand but the idea seems quite clever.
What I'm most surprised about is just how well it actually works... I did not think such EM fluctuations would be usably detectable from several meters away... but I suppose this may be moreso due to improper/lack of shielding in the first place, which I would think should be easily fixable in most products to mitigate this type of detection.
Youtube subtitles can help in situations like this. Although they're not able to understand perfectly either. Example (1m0s) speaker means to say 'they can be disguised' but subtitles are:
> they can be disgusted
I think the speaker genuinely gets that word wrong; a malapropism (as opposed to the auto-generated English subtitles getting it wrong).
Really interesting concept! I would not have thought of EMR variation as a usable side channel for this.
IIUC, the EMR increases following scene changes (like a light being turned on or off) are a result of the fact that video codecs try hard to compress similar images. So, I speculate that an "extremely bad codec" that simply dumps raw pixels to storage would not produce such variation, and therefore remain undetectable?
True...but I suppose such shielding may make it harder to disguise...maybe...I don't know. In any case, I wonder how it would do in noisy environments (a couple of computers and phones in the room).
Would a typical airbnb perv have the know-how to produce a professional grade setup? E.g. they'd only have to screw up once to be detectable by this system.
A consumer-grade device to perform a quick run over my hotel/airbnb that detects 90% (or even 50%) of hidden cameras would be useful because the status quo (doing nothing) detects ~0%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
And then I thought, something similar might be possible for video. Turns out, yep.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8719264
The Eye of Sauron paper does acknowledge the limitations that would likely prevent it from working against such a device. Impressive nonetheless. True privacy/security is just very hard!
AKA, you know, Peter Thiel.
What I'm most surprised about is just how well it actually works... I did not think such EM fluctuations would be usably detectable from several meters away... but I suppose this may be moreso due to improper/lack of shielding in the first place, which I would think should be easily fixable in most products to mitigate this type of detection.
> they can be disgusted
I think the speaker genuinely gets that word wrong; a malapropism (as opposed to the auto-generated English subtitles getting it wrong).
IIUC, the EMR increases following scene changes (like a light being turned on or off) are a result of the fact that video codecs try hard to compress similar images. So, I speculate that an "extremely bad codec" that simply dumps raw pixels to storage would not produce such variation, and therefore remain undetectable?
A better mitigation might be to take a leaf from cryptography and develop a constant-time codec.
A consumer-grade device to perform a quick run over my hotel/airbnb that detects 90% (or even 50%) of hidden cameras would be useful because the status quo (doing nothing) detects ~0%.