Spearphone: A lightweight speech privacy exploit via accelerometer-sensed reverberations from smartphone loudspeakers

Abstract

In this paper, we build a speech privacy attack that exploits speech reverberations from a smartphone's inbuilt loudspeaker captured via a zero-permission motion sensor (accelerometer). We design our attack Spearphone, and demonstrate that speech reverberations from inbuilt loudspeakers, at an appropriate loudness, can impact the accelerometer, leaking sensitive information about the speech. In particular, we show that by exploiting the affected accelerometer readings and carefully selecting feature sets along with off-the-shelf machine learning techniques, Spearphone can perform gender classification (accuracy over 90%) and speaker identification (accuracy over 80%) for the audio/video playback on the smartphone for our recorded dataset. We use lightweight classifiers and an off-the-shelf machine learning tool so that the attacking effort is minimized, making our attack practical. Our results with testing the attack on a voice call and voice assistant response were also encouraging, showcasing the impact of the proposed attack. In addition, we perform speech recognition and speech reconstruction to extract more information about the eavesdropped speech to an extent. Our work brings to light a fundamental design vulnerability in many currently-deployed smartphones, which may put people's speech privacy at risk while using the smartphone in the loudspeaker mode during phone calls, media playback or voice assistant interactions.