학술논문

Inaudible Attack on Smart Speakers With Intentional Electromagnetic Interference
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Techn. Microwave Theory and Techniques, IEEE Transactions on. 69(5):2642-2650 May, 2021
Subject
Fields, Waves and Electromagnetics
Microphones
Electromagnetic interference
Security
Couplings
Ultrasonic imaging
Mixers
Speech recognition
Hardware security
inaudible attack
intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI)
smart speaker
Language
ISSN
0018-9480
1557-9670
Abstract
This article demonstrates an inaudible attack on smart speakers using electromagnetic interference (EMI). The EMI induces voltages on the order of a few millivolts on conductors, which are then converted into baseband signals by exploiting the inherent nonlinearity of microphones. The EMI signal is specially preprocessed to minimize the useless harmonics generation at the microphone output signals, which significantly improves the recognition rate as well as nullify the previous countermeasures based on the harmonics detection. The sensitive carrier frequency found by our proposed method can improve the attack distance as well. A measurement-based methodology is applied to locate the sensitive regions for noise coupling without knowing the layout of the printed circuit board (PCB), and the transfer function is also obtained to insure the main coupling location. Our experiments show that in open space, intentional EMI under 2.5 W can inject commands at distances up to 2.5 m on smart speakers.