Laser-Based Command Injection Attacks on Voice-Controlled Microphone Arrays

Abstract

Voice-controlled (VC) systems, such as mobile phones and smart speakers, enable users to operate smart devices through voice commands. Previous works (e.g., LightCommands) show that attackers can trigger VC systems to respond to various audio commands by injecting light signals. However, LightCommands only discusses attacks on devices with a single microphone, while new devices typically use microphone arrays with sensor fusion technology for better capturing sound from different distances. By replicating LightCommands’s experiments on the new devices, we find that simply extending the light scope (just as they do) to overlap multiple microphone apertures is inadequate to wake up the device with sensor fusion. Adapting LightCommands’s approach to microphone arrays is challenging due to their requirement for multiple sound amplifiers, and each amplifier requires an independent power driver with unique settings. The number of additional devices increases with the microphone aperture count, significantly increasing the complexity of implementing and deploying the attack equipment. With a growing number of devices adopting sensor fusion to distinguish the sound location, it is essential to propose new approaches to adapting the light injection attacks to these new devices. To address these problems, we propose a lightweight microphone array laser injection solution called LCMA (Laser Commands for Microphone Array), which can use a single laser controller to manipulate multiple laser points and simultaneously target all the apertures of a microphone array and input light waves at different frequencies. Our key design is to propose a new PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) based control signal algorithm that can be implemented on a single MCU and directly control multiple lasers via different PWM output channels. Moreover, LCMA can be remotely configured via BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). These features allow our solution to be deployed on a drone to covertly attack the targets hidden inside the building. Using LCMA, we successfully attack 29 devices. The experiment results show that LCMA is robust on the newest devices such as the iPhone 15, and the control panel of the Tesla Model Y.