Mic-E-Mouse turns gaming mouse sensors into microphones

Your computer mouse is now a surveillance device, congratulations! Researchers demonstrated that high-performance optical sensors in cheap gaming mice can pick up acoustic vibrations from your desk surface and reconstruct speech with 80% speaker identification accuracy and 16.79% word error rate. Their paper from UC Irvine tested mice such as the Razer Viper 8KHz at 20,000 DPI and 8 kHz polling, and the authors say they informed the vendors of 26 affected products as well as sensor maker PixArt. The attack works through compromised software that turns $50 mice into inadvertent microphones, proving that the IoT security nightmare extends to devices we never considered “smart.” Watch the pipeline demonstration and wonder what other mundane peripherals are secretly narcs.