Top
Best
New

Posted by ortusdux 2 days ago

Eye of Sauron: Long-Range Hidden Spy Camera Detection(www.usenix.org)
80 points | 13 comments
someguyiguess 54 minutes ago|
Eye of Sauron to counter Palantir. Makes sense.
yawpitch 16 minutes ago|
Does it though? The Eye of Sauron represents the being so sufficiently single-minded that it corrupted the Palantir and weaponized them for evil ends.

AKA, you know, Peter Thiel.

ranger_danger 2 hours ago||
The speaker in the video was extremely difficult for me to understand but the idea seems quite clever.

What I'm most surprised about is just how well it actually works... I did not think such EM fluctuations would be usably detectable from several meters away... but I suppose this may be moreso due to improper/lack of shielding in the first place, which I would think should be easily fixable in most products to mitigate this type of detection.

nomilk 1 hour ago|
Youtube subtitles can help in situations like this. Although they're not able to understand perfectly either. Example (1m0s) speaker means to say 'they can be disguised' but subtitles are:

> they can be disgusted

I think the speaker genuinely gets that word wrong; a malapropism (as opposed to the auto-generated English subtitles getting it wrong).

Jackobrien 2 hours ago||
This feels very impactful for national security and corporate espionage.
rsamtravis 2 hours ago||
Okay who can build me one of these?
akoboldfrying 1 hour ago||
Really interesting concept! I would not have thought of EMR variation as a usable side channel for this.

IIUC, the EMR increases following scene changes (like a light being turned on or off) are a result of the fact that video codecs try hard to compress similar images. So, I speculate that an "extremely bad codec" that simply dumps raw pixels to storage would not produce such variation, and therefore remain undetectable?

fwlr 41 minutes ago|
Potentially, although raw pixel data presents its own challenges - one 1080p60 camera will fill a terabyte of storage in less than an hour.

A better mitigation might be to take a leaf from cryptography and develop a constant-time codec.

bezusfaphoon 1 hour ago||
phenomenal
soltanov 1 hour ago|
[flagged]
terribleperson 1 hour ago||
I wonder if that shielding would show up in WiFi imaging techniques.
SubiculumCode 1 hour ago|||
True...but I suppose such shielding may make it harder to disguise...maybe...I don't know. In any case, I wonder how it would do in noisy environments (a couple of computers and phones in the room).
mike_d 1 hour ago||
Exactly. Professional grade equipment already has extensive shielding to mitigate non-linear junction detectors.
nomilk 58 minutes ago||
Would a typical airbnb perv have the know-how to produce a professional grade setup? E.g. they'd only have to screw up once to be detectable by this system.

A consumer-grade device to perform a quick run over my hotel/airbnb that detects 90% (or even 50%) of hidden cameras would be useful because the status quo (doing nothing) detects ~0%.