Researchers find way to listen in on headphones from afar

Researchers based in China have devised a way to eavesdrop on signals handled by analog components in devices such as headphones, landline handsets, and smart devices by injecting electromagnetic (EM) signals. The technique, referred to as InjectEave, is not simply listening in on a low-frequency analog signal. It's an EM side-channel attack that overcomes one of the longstanding barriers to exploiting EM leakage: the faintness of RF signals in devices like headphones makes it difficult for adversarial listeners to separate signal from noise. Many different RF side-channel attacks have been explored, such as reading screen display emissions to reconstruct on-screen text or detecting the RF signals emitted by keys on a keyboard. But these...

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