New App Turns Your Smartphone Into a Spy Gadget

How about turning your smartphone into a spy gadget? It's possible with just a new app.

Researchers from Stanford University with Israeli defence firm Rafael have developed an Android app called Gyrophone that picks up vibrations of sound by using vibrating pressure plates in the phone's gyroscope.

The tiny gyroscopes in your phone that measure orientation do so by using vibrating pressure plates.

The app picks frequencies in the 80-250Hz range - the base frequencies of the human voice, rt.com reported.

Researchers said gyroscopes found on most smartphones are sensitive enough to be able to detect acoustic signals in the vicinity of the phone. The team adds that with advanced signal processing techniques and adaptive software, the signals can be used to identify speaker information and even make out speech.

The scientists detailed their findings on the Stanford Security Research website, which also hosts the full paper.

We show that the MEMS gyroscopes found on modern smart phones are sufficiently sensitive to measure acoustic signals in the vicinity of the phone. The resulting signals contain only very low-frequency information (< 200Hz). Nevertheless we show, using signal processing and machine learning, that this information is sufficient to identify speaker information and even parse speech. Since iOS and Android require no special permissions to access the gyro, our results show that apps and active web content that cannot access the microphone can nevertheless eavesdrop on speech in the vicinity of the phone.

The team has made the Gyrophone app available to download in apk form, for those that want to test out their smartphone's gyroscope. A video was also released, showcasing the app's potential.