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Article
Inaudible Attack on Smart Speakers with Intentional Electromagnetic Interference
IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques
  • Zhifei Xu
  • Runbing Hua
  • Jack Juang
  • Shengxuan Xia
  • Jun Fan, Missouri University of Science and Technology
  • Chulsoon Hwang, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Abstract

This article demonstrates an inaudible attack on smart speakers using electromagnetic interference (EMI). The EMI induces voltages on the order of a few millivolts on conductors, which are then converted into baseband signals by exploiting the inherent nonlinearity of microphones. The EMI signal is specially preprocessed to minimize the useless harmonics generation at the microphone output signals, which significantly improves the recognition rate as well as nullify the previous countermeasures based on the harmonics detection. The sensitive carrier frequency found by our proposed method can improve the attack distance as well. A measurement-based methodology is applied to locate the sensitive regions for noise coupling without knowing the layout of the printed circuit board (PCB), and the transfer function is also obtained to insure the main coupling location. Our experiments show that in open space, intentional EMI under 2.5 W can inject commands at distances up to 2.5 m on smart speakers.

Department(s)
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Center/Lab(s)
Intelligent Systems Center
Keywords and Phrases
  • Hardware Security,
  • Inaudible Attack,
  • Intentional Electromagnetic Interference (IEMI),
  • Smart Speaker
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2021 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), All rights reserved.
Publication Date
5-1-2021
Publication Date
01 May 2021
Citation Information
Zhifei Xu, Runbing Hua, Jack Juang, Shengxuan Xia, et al.. "Inaudible Attack on Smart Speakers with Intentional Electromagnetic Interference" IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques Vol. 69 Iss. 5 (2021) p. 2642 - 2650 ISSN: 0018-9480; 1557-9670
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/chulsoon-hwang/95/