Smart Speakers At Your Home Can Be Hacked By Laser Light Commands: Report

Do you know that the smart speaker at your home is vulnerable to hacking? According to a new finding by researchers, there is a new way of hacking smart speakers, which includes lasers to send a command to hack AI-powered speakers.

Built-in microphones in the smart speakers respond to light and modulate an electrical signal in the form of a laser beam. Hacking is using lasers to trick the microphones and influence them that they are listening to a spoken command.

Speakers like Amazon Echo, Google Home are vulnerable to this type of laser attack. Wired has reported that Takeshi Sugawara a cyber-security researcher along with a group of researchers from the University of Michigan are claiming that they have found a way to change the intensity of laser beam and guide it towards the microphones of the smart speaker and command the speaker like a normal voice command without saying anything.

Meanwhile, the report also claimed that this trick can be used to hack any computer or laptop which comes with a built-in microphone to accept voice commands. Researchers have also tested the same method to manipulate smartphones and tablets and get some successful attempts. This clearly shows that the vulnerability is huge, it not just about the smart home speaker. These laser commands can be used to attack anything which has microphones in it.

"Light Commands is a vulnerability of MEMS microphones that allows attackers to remotely inject inaudible and invisible commands into voice assistants, such as Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Facebook Portal, and Apple Siri using light," the researchers wrote on a website dedicated to the Light Commands vulnerability.

This vulnerability can allow someone to break into other smart speakers which are connected with other smart home appliances. Hacker can use this method to send commands like "open the front door" to break into someone's house, open the garage door for car theft, make an online payment for shopping with your card details and more.

Although the vulnerability unquestionably sounds very serious, it will require a great deal of exertion from an attacker to misuse it. It requires specific gear like a laser pointer, laser driver, sound enhancer, a zooming lens, and more. Moreover, the attacker has to plan the attack accordingly because he/she can be caught easily when the laser beam was aiming at the speaker.