StealthyIMU: Stealing Permission-protected Private Information From Smartphone Voice Assistant Using Zero-Permission Sensors

Abstract

—Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) are becoming an indispensable module that enables hands-free interaction between human users and smartphones. Unfortunately, recent research revealed a side channel that allows zero-permission motion sensors to eavesdrop on the VUI voices from the co-located smartphone loudspeaker. Nonetheless, these threats are limited to leaking a small set of digits and hot words. In this paper, we propose StealthyIMU, a new threat that uses motion sensors to steal permission-protected private information from the VUIs. We develop a set of efficient models to detect and extract private information, taking advantage of the deterministic structures in the VUI responses. Our experiments show that StealthyIMU can steal private information from 23 types of frequently-used voice commands to acquire contacts, search history, calendar, home address, and even GPS trace with high accuracy. We further propose effective mechanisms to defend against StealthyIMU without noticeably impacting the user experience.