Researchers hack a robotic vacuum cleaner to record speech remotely

Scientists have found that robotic vacuum cleaners could allow snoopers to remotely listen in to household conversations, despite not being fitted with microphones. US experts found they can perform a remote eavesdropping attack on a Xiaomi Roborock robot cleaner by remotely accessing its Lidar readings – which helps these cleaners to avoid bumping into furniture. Lidar is a method for measuring distances by illuminating the target with laser beams and measuring their reflection with a sensor. But Lidar can also capture sound signals by obtaining reflections off of objects in the home, like a rubbish bin, that vibrate due to nearby sound sources, such as a person talking. A hacker could repurpose a vacuum's Lidar sensor to sense acoustic signals in the environment, remotely harvest the Lidar data from the cloud and process the raw signal with deep learning techniques to extract audio information.