Eye of Sauron: Long-Range Hidden Spy Camera Detection

(usenix.org)

43 points | by ortusdux 2 days ago ago

7 comments

  • soltanov 29 minutes ago

    Impressive research, but the countermeasure is fifty years old: adequate shielding. The authors did not find a fundamental flaw in cameras; they found cheap plastic enclosures.

    • SubiculumCode 8 minutes ago

      True...but I suppose such shielding may make it harder to disguise...maybe...I don't know. In any case, I wonder how it would do in noisy environments (a couple of computers and phones in the room).

  • Jackobrien an hour ago

    This feels very impactful for national security and corporate espionage.

  • rsamtravis an hour ago

    Okay who can build me one of these?

  • ranger_danger an hour ago

    The speaker in the video was extremely difficult for me to understand but the idea seems quite clever.

    What I'm most surprised about is just how well it actually works... I did not think such EM fluctuations would be usably detectable from several meters away... but I suppose this may be moreso due to improper/lack of shielding in the first place, which I would think should be easily fixable in most products to mitigate this type of detection.

  • akoboldfrying 36 minutes ago

    Really interesting concept! I would not have thought of EMR variation as a usable side channel for this.

    IIUC, the EMR increases following scene changes (like a light being turned on or off) are a result of the fact that video codecs try hard to compress similar images. So, I speculate that an "extremely bad codec" that simply dumps raw pixels to storage would not produce such variation, and therefore remain undetectable?

  • bezusfaphoon 38 minutes ago

    phenomenal