Your smartphone could help track spy cameras
Researchers claim their system has an almost 90% success rate
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Academiccybersecurityresearchers from Singapore and South Korea have repurposed the time-of-flight (ToF) sensors insmartphonecameras to help spot concealed spy cams.
ToF sensors help resolve distance between the camera and the subject, and have started showing up in smartphones recently. For instance,Apple’siPhone 12,iPhone 13, andSamsung’s Galaxy S20+, amongseveral others, all include a laser-basedSony ToF sensorthat’s used for augmented reality applications, and for adding depth information to 2D imagery.
The Registerspotted a paper by Sriram Sami, Bangjie Sun, and Sean Rui Xiang Tan, from National University of Singapore, and Jun Han from Yonsei University, where they describe a novel strategy to use ToF to spot hidden spy cams in hotel rooms and washrooms.
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Spot the naught
Building a case for their solution, the researchers note that the current generation of devices that are designed to find these miniscule spy cameras have low detection rates. Moreover, proposals to detect the spy cameras using their wireless traffic could help detect their presence, but won’t help pinpoint their location.
In their paper presented at the 19th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems earlier this week, the researchers described their solution dubbed Laser-Assisted Photography Detection (LAPD), which overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by using ToF sensors on commodity smartphones.
“We implement LAPD as a smartphone app that emits laser signals from the ToF sensor, and use computer vision and machine learning techniques to locate the unique reflections from hidden cameras,”explainthe researchers in their paper.
The researchers field tested LAPD with the help of 379 participants and the system achieved an 88.9% hidden camera detection rate.
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With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’sTechRadar Pro’sexpert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.
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