Hard Drive of Hearing - Disks that Eavesdrop with a Synthesized Microphone

Explore a groundbreaking security research presentation that unveils how magnetic hard disk drives can be exploited as unintentional microphones, capable of extracting and parsing human speech with surprising accuracy. Delve into the innovative proof-of-concept attack demonstrating the potential for privacy invasion through non-traditional sensors. Learn about the challenges, threat model, and technical aspects of this cyberphysical attack surface, including sampling rates, spectrograms, and audio quality assessments. Discover the implications of this research, including the ability for extracted audio to be recognized by services like Shazam. Gain insights into potential defense mechanisms, such as ultrasonic aliasing, to mitigate acoustic eavesdropping risks posed by these synthesized microphones in hard disk drives.