Great, now in addition to putting Sellotape over my webcam, tissue paper in my keyholes, and tin foil over my head, I'm going to have to whisper quietly around my gaming mouse. That's because, according to some researchers (via Igor's Lab) our optical gaming mice might be able to spy on what we're saying.
And is it a surprise that this fiendish development is aided by AI? Not to me, it's not. Judging from the video demonstration above, the real magic occurs in the last stage of the pipeline, where the neural model cleans up the speech even better than the Wiener filter does (no sniggering, that's a serious scientific term).
Apparently this method of snooping can be performed on "consumer-grade mice with high-fidelity sensors", which sounds a lot like "gaming mouse" to me. That does seem to be exactly the case, as in the full paper (pdf warning) we can see the researchers used a Razer Viper at 8 kHz polling to train the models used for this attack.
I suppose one of the key requirements is a high polling rate, as a higher polling rate means more data, which means more accurate data clean-up to isolate acoustics, ie, speech: "Attackers can exploit these sensors’ ever-increasing polling rate and sensitivity to emulate a makeshift microphone and covertly eavesdrop on unsuspecting users."
The researchers also point out that "creative software, video games, and other high performance, low latency software are ideal targets for injecting our exploit." Video games in particular are "ideal targets" because many of them "contain networking code that can be reused by our exploit without raising suspicion. Thus, using a video game as the delivery vehicle of our exploit allows us to meet the performance demands of our collection scheme."
However, it looks like the mouse might need to be on a hard, flat surface, and also remain still, for the data to be cleaned well enough to get any speech out of it. So I doubt you'd have to worry while running around in Battlefield 6. Sitting still on bomb site B, defending the entrance to Tunnels on Dust 2, might be another story, though.
Perhaps more than anything this is just another reason to keep our polling rates to 2 kHz or lower. All it does is drain your battery anyway, as you won't be able to notice the difference by bumping the polling much higher than this.
1. Best wireless:
Razer DeathAdder V4 Pro
2. Best wired:
Logitech G502 X
3. Best budget wireless:
Logitech G305 Lightspeed
4. Best budget wired:
Glorious Model O Eternal
5. Best lightweight:
Corsair Sabre V2 Pro
6. Best MMO:
Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless SE
7. Best compact:
Razer Cobra Pro
8. Best ambidextrous:
Logitech G Pro
9. Best ergonomic:
Keychron M5
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