Hard Drive of Hearing: Disks that Eavesdrop with a Synthesized Microphone Andrew Kwong!, Wenyuan and Kevin of University Abstract—Security conscious individuals may take considerable measures to disab

Hard Drive of Hearing: Disks that Eavesdrop with a Synthesized Microphone
Andrew Kwong!, Wenyuan and Kevin
of
University
Abstract—Security conscious individuals may take considerable
measures to disable sensors in order to protect their privacy. 4
However, they often overlook the cyberphysical attack surface
exposed devices that were never designed to be sensors in
the first place. Our research demonstrates that the mechanical
components in magnetic hard disk drives behave as micro-
phones with sufficient precision to extract and parse human
speech. These unintentional microphones sense speech with
high enough fidelity for the Shazam service to recognize a
song recorded through the hard drive. This proof of concept о
attack sheds light on the possibility of invasion of privacy
even in absence of traditional sensors. We also present defense
mechanisms, such as the use of ultrasonic aliasing, that can Head
mitigate acoustic eavesdropping synthesized microphones
in hard disk drives.
1. Introduction
Magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs) continue to persist о о 92
in everything from legacy laptops to server racks. Because
of their critical role in a wide variety of applications, hard
target for cyber Figure 1: The Position Error Signal (PES) measures the
offset of the read/write head from the center of the track.
hacking organization, dubbed the “Equation devel-