3d ago

Motion sensors in high-performance mice can be used as a microphone to spy on users, thanks to AI — Mic-E-Mouse technique harnesses mouse sensors, converts acoustic vibrations into speech

www.tomshardware.com

This mouse has ears.

Full paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13581

41 comments

Just use a mouse pad.
Now I need to know whether or not they did this testing with trackball mice. Hopefully they're safer from these types of attacks.
Can we stop finding ways to do this?
- If the people on the good side stop trying to find exploits like this, and by finding them develop awareness and knowledge about them, so that countermeasures can be devised, then bad actors are much more likely to find new exploits first, and when they exploit it you won't even see it coming anymore.
- https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-collection/collection-highlights/the-great-seal/
  Governments have been finding crazy ways to listen to eachother for so long. Now every ear is directed at consumers to milk them like cows.
- Sadly no. The only way is to come up with countermeasures.
  play music through speakers while using mouse
  leave rumble gamepad playing demo of game on desk
  put vibrator set to 'random pulse mode' on the desk
- Use a trackpad?
  
  What kind of masochist would ever want to use a trackpad? Nothing against people who actually do, but I absolutely HATE trackpads because I have had a long history of not having a good time with them.
We'all need foss mice.
- We got 'em already: https://ploopy.co/mouse/
  
  PMW3360
  \ QMK
  \ kit to build it yourself
  A poopy mouse, nice!
  3D printed
  Interesting.
  It turns out it's not the only open sauce mouser out there (eg g-wolves).
That requires a mouse with an 8kHz polling rate. With a 1kHz polling rate, this trick will be limited to sounds under 500Hz.
- Cool, cool. So what hertz range would you say a woman moaning or a particularly loud fart fall around ? Just out of curiosity...
  
  Human speech is between about 130-300Hz, so even with a lower poling rate it can pick it up. And assuming she sound like a mosquito, it’ll pick things up.
- Huh you know from a music perspective I know we can get a lot higher than 500hz but most speech is apparently around 1-300hz.
- Well now I kind of want to mic up a kick drum with my gaming mouse for fun lol
  
  I wonder if it would sound better taped on, in the drum itself, or on the floor in front. Seems like there would be minimal bleed too haha, might be a cool lo-fi thing
- I only speak in infrasound...
- And probably only works when configured to use the the highest DPI settings.
the raw audio data is run through digital signal processing using a Wiener Filter, where you can start to hear some information.
Oy, no tittering in the back.
- Weiner Filter sounds made up
For a moment I imagined some Chad mouse with super sensing
They mean computer mouse...
Geeze, companies today are so desperate
Here's a link to the source
https://sites.google.com/view/mic-e-mouse

41 comments