The Mic-E-Mouse Attack Turns Your Gaming Mouse Into An Eavesdropper

Using Your Gaming Mouse To Game You

It’s not just the walls that have ears, that mouse on your desk might be spying on you too!   The wonderfully named Mic-E-Mouse attack, conceived of by researchers at UC Irvine, can turn an optical mouse with at least a 20,000 DPI sensor and decent latency into a kind of microphone.  Your desk and mouse vibrate slightly when you talk, and with the impressive precision that the sensors in gaming mice offer it is quite possible to measure those tiny vibrations.  With decent latency, which goes hand in hand with high polling rates, those vibrations can not just be detected, they can be captured in real time.

The software your peripherals use, be they proprietary or a default Microsoft drive, is not secured to the same extent that a lot of the other software on your system is.  Making changes to button mappings and sensitivity don’t trigger a UAC prompt and we are very thankful for that.  Unfortunately it seems that convenience is a security hole which can now be taken advantage of.  It can also likely be used to capture keystrokes, as each key on your keyboard will produce a unique sound when depressed.

There are 26 vulnerable mouse manufacturers identified by the researchers, but they are not named for somewhat obvious reasons.   You can learn more about Weiner filters and how the research was conducted over at The Register.