A groundbreaking cybersecurity vulnerability has been discovered that transforms everyday computer mice into sophisticated eavesdropping tools.
Researchers have developed the “Mic-E-Mouse” attack, which exploits high-performance optical sensors in consumer mice to secretly capture confidential user conversations through acoustic vibrations transmitted via work surfaces.
How the Attack Works Through Surface Vibrations
The Mic-E-Mouse attack capitalizes on the increasingly sensitive optical sensors found in modern computer mice.
These sensors, designed for precision tracking, can detect minute acoustic vibrations that propagate through desks and work surfaces when users speak.
While the captured signal initially suffers from poor quality, non-uniform sampling, and extreme quantization, researchers have developed a sophisticated processing pipeline using signal processing and machine learning techniques to reconstruct intelligible speech.
The attack achieves remarkable results despite these technical challenges. Testing on consumer-grade sensors using VCTK and AudioMNIST speech datasets demonstrated an SI-SNR increase of +19dB, speaker recognition accuracy of 80% in automated tests, and a word error rate of just 16.79% in human studies.
The pipeline successfully captures human speech frequencies between 200Hz and 2000Hz, covering the majority of conversational audio.
The vulnerability becomes more concerning as high-performance mice become increasingly accessible to consumers.
Advanced input devices with vulnerable sensors are now available for under $50, making the attack vector widespread across consumer, corporate, and government environments.
As manufacturing costs continue decreasing due to technological improvements, the attack surface for these vulnerabilities continues expanding.
The threat model targets open-source applications where collecting high-frequency mouse data appears legitimate.
Creative software, video games, and other high-performance applications serve as ideal delivery vehicles for injecting the exploit without raising suspicion.
Many video games contain networking code that attackers can repurpose to extract collected mouse data from victim computers discretely.
The Mic-E-Mouse pipeline operates entirely invisibly to average users during data collection phases.
Attackers only need access to a vulnerable mouse and compromised software running on the victim’s computer, including potentially benign web-based applications.
Once data collection completes, all signal processing and analysis can occur offline at the attacker’s convenience.
The attack demonstrates that auditory surveillance through high-performance optical sensors is now technically feasible, effective, and performant.
This discovery highlights a previously unknown attack vector that transforms common computer peripherals into covert surveillance devices, raising significant privacy concerns for individuals and organizations using modern input devices with advanced optical sensors.
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