AI helps turn a gaming mouse's high-performance optical sensor into a microphone

Researchers show how easy it is to use a mouse's optical sensor to secretly record and capture speech in a new 'critical vulnerability'.

AI helps turn a gaming mouse's high-performance optical sensor into a microphone
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TL;DR: Researchers from the University of California developed Mic-E-Mouse, an AI-powered tool that exploits high-DPI optical sensors in gaming mice to eavesdrop on speech by detecting surface vibrations. This critical vulnerability enables up to 80% accurate speech recognition, posing significant privacy risks, especially through video game exploits.

Although going for featherweight and ultra-lightweight builds is the latest trend for gaming mice (check out our various mouse reviews here), high-speed optical sensors with impressive sensitivity have been a thing for years. Corsair's SABRE v2 PRO features a 33K or 33,000 DPI optical sensor. The premium Razer DeathAdder V4 Pro Wireless ups the ante to an astounding 45K, while the more affordable PowerColor ALPHYN AM10 Wireless Gaming Mouse still boasts an impressive 26K optical sensor.

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Thanks to a new AI-powered and fascinating tool called Mic-E-Mouse, any mouse with an optical sensor and at least 20K or 20,000 DPI sensitivity can be used as a makeshift microphone to eavesdrop on people and record their speech, and is described as a "critical vulnerability" by the team of researchers from the University of California that developed Mic-E-Mouse.

If you're wondering how a high-performance optical sensor in a mouse can be used to not only detect speech but decipher what's being said with an accuracy of 80%, it sounds like the sort of thing you'd see on TV and roll your eyes thinking, "no way that's possible."

As speech creates sound waves with an acoustic vibration, Mic-E-Mouse uses the vibrations on the user's work surface or table that the mouse is sitting on to detect these vibrations. However, as these vibrations are "low-quality and suffer from non-uniform sampling, a non-linear frequency response, and extreme quantization," they're seemingly unusable for speech recognition.

However, when paired with signal processing (Wiener filtering) and AI, speech can be recovered. Not only that, but the researchers behind Mic-E-Mouse note that it's surprisingly easy to "collect mouse packet data and extract audio waveforms," and that the ideal "exploit delivery vehicle" for the technology is video games.

"Many video games often contain networking code that can be reused by our exploit without raising suspicion," the researchers note. "Thus, using a video game as the delivery vehicle of our exploit allows us to meet the performance demands of our collection scheme."

For a detailed breakdown of Mic-E-Mouse, you can find the full research paper here. In the meantime, here's a video of it in action.