virus over audio?

[Raj]

I smell bull$#!t 
2013-11-badbios-malware-microphone-speakers.html

and there are tons of other articles if you google "microphone virus"
it seems like even the most techey  people bought into it.

reasons for my disbelief-
First of all, soundcards aren't capable of generating ultrasounds,
second, ultrasound is unidirectional
third, most probably mic circuitry is turned off and will ignore it

why don't they hook up a freaking oscilloscope to check it out?

what do you guys think?

pro advice needed

[BobsURuncle]

That is a bad link.

[Raj]

Sorry
 
http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2013/12/researchers-prove-pc-viruses-can-spread-microphones

[Len]

It turns out that the reported computer virus did not exist. Here is a follow-up article:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/researcher-skepticism-grows-over-badbios-malware-claims/

As for ultrasonic communication between PCs, that's the part of the story that is possible. As noted in the article you linked, it was demonstrated by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute. That's where MP3 was developed, so they know something about PC audio.

[Ian.M]

The initial infection vector still has to get executable code into memory and jump to it.  Virus-to-virus ultrasonic comms is obviously possible, but that's not a possible route for infection, as there's nothing on a clean machine that would decode AND execute the recieved ultrasound.

[sarepairman2]

Unless you use a method of entry into a computer that allows you to "choose" drivers (i.e. a "hail" signal like on USB that identifies the device) then its extremely unlikely it can be used as a infection route without some kind of malicious firmware on the computer.

if there is a hail signal then there are exploits relating to buffer overflow I believe... I am not sure how low level it is, i.e. microsoft or motherboard firmware.

[Len]

I don't think anyone ever claimed that this hypothetical virus used sound to infect a "clean" PC. Supposedly it would use sound to communicate between infected computers. (But it turned out there was no such virus anyway.)

[Pack34]

Missing Mazzie... Mazzie is missing...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1226681/

Very good movie.

[vk6zgo]

The scungy little speakers & mics on most computers barely make the audio spectrum.

We are supposed to believe that they can communicate at ultrasonic frequencies,& not only that,have sufficient bandwidth to pass  a complex virus signal.

As the OP says,why didn't they test the hypothesis with an oscillator?

The most likely answer is,that as IT people,they are laypersons as far as Electronics are concerned.
They probably wouldn't know how to connect up an oscillator to a PC speaker.

After all,they didn't do the most obvious test------gaffer tape over the speakers/mics,or just disconnect them!

[MrSlack]

This is feasible but most likely a complete pile of steaming bollocks. Absolutely no malware could be transmitted via this vector to start with and there's no reason to do it afterwards with ubiquitous network connectivity and the sheer amount of hole-ridden average low grade software engineering out there.

[SL4P]

Oh well, all those infrasound whingers now have something else to complain about.
Sick leave, compensation, sue the boss - whatever it takes to do less work.

[Marco]

With continuously running voice recognition this is actually becoming a realistic threat on some platforms.

PS. surprised no one said this yet : virus over audio, you mean like religion?

[cloudscapes]

First of all, soundcards aren't capable of generating ultrasounds,

Disagreed, they are often very capable of generating ultrasounds. If ultrasound is anything above the audible range, then it's anything above 18-20khz. My soundcard is capable of 96khz, which has been what's expected of good soundcards for a few years. I'm not saying the sound is accurate at that range, just that it's capable of greater than human audible range.

Though this is all still likely bullshit. As people in the thread are saying, desktop speakers and cheap mics people hook up will be the bottleneck, more than the soundcard. Unless you're using studio reference monitors as desktop speakers, I doubt they go above 15khz.

EDIT: Just performed a test.

Test 1: Got Audible to generate higher and higher frequency sine tones from my soundcard into my studio reference monitors (better than desktop speakers). I use a Zoom H6 recorder's microphones to record the audio. It's a great recorder I use al lthe time, and I completely trust it's specs to record high def audio. I also made sure my soundcard's settings were set to enable 96khz output.

In this test, the recorder could no longer "hear" the sine tone at around 22-23khz. I opened up the recording, and it was relatively clean as it fades out at 22khz. Had these been ordinary desktop speakers, it would have been much lower.

Test 2: Plugged the soundcard output direct into the H6 recorder and performed the same test of increasing the tone frequency. I could crank it up past 40khz! Due to the recording frequency approaching a small multiple of the playback frequency, the shape of the sine was more of a triangle than a sine, (a limitation I can't really get around, with the H6's max sampling frquency of 96khz). Past 42-44khz I get nasty beat frequencies. This was all visual inspection of the recording, obviously, since it's all ultrasonic.

So yeah, can I get clean ultrasonic out of my sound card? No, not clean/precise probably. But it is capable of it. As expected, the main bottleneck is the cheapness of desktop speakers and microphones. I'm sure ultrasonic 'information' could be transfered from one soundcard to another via direct cable and as long as the signal itself is simple (like squarewaves), but over the air from one desktop speaker to a microhpone? Doubt it. Not unless they're very high quality monitors and mics. And the tone/signal integrety breaks down only a couple of 10s of khz in the ultrasonic. Can't get around those sampling/nyquist hard limits.

[Ian.M]

A typical PC microphone can have quite good frequency response above 20KHz, e.g a typical electret capsule is likely to have an upper frequency limit somewhere between 30 and 50 KHz.  Even if all the sound card can do is 44.1KHz sample rate, that's still good enough to detect modulated 22KHz ultrasound if it doesn't have good analog anti-aliasing filtering in front of the ADC.

There's also the issue of generating 22KHz ultrasound with usable amplitude. Physically small internal speakers and HiFi grade external speakers may have enough bandwidth. One odd-ball idea is to modulate the CPU load and rely on magnetostriction in the inductors of the CPU's Vcore switching supply.

Who's going to bother writing a virus to exploit this?   Possibly a three letter agency trying to crack a high value target. Gain transient physical access or drop infected media and one could compromise a PC in a way that the opposing agency would  be very unlikely to detect.   The existence of the Stuxnet worm shows that  agencies exist that have a significant budget for offensive cyper-warfare. 

[Len]

We are supposed to believe that they can communicate at ultrasonic frequencies,& not only that,have sufficient bandwidth to pass  a complex virus signal.

Yes, because people have actually done it. Here's the paper describing the experiments done at the Fraunhofer Institute:
http://www.jocm.us/uploadfile/2013/1125/20131125103803901.pdf
They did not make an actual virus but they did send & receive data. The data rate was low, but fast enough for, say, a keylogger.

(Geez people, it took like half a minute to find this stuff out starting from the first linked article.)

[zapta]

This is not a virus, but according to Computer World sound communication is pretty common these days for various applications.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2861717/the-hottest-wireless-technology-is-now-sound.html

If devices monitor microphone input and act on it, there is a theoretical possibility that a malicious signal will trigger a malicious action. Same goes for a malicious agent that is installed on an otherwise isolated computer and can interact with the external world via the audio channel.

[Marco]

The recent ImageMagick vulnerability which hit countless webservers is a good example why always on microphone input/processing is a bad idea unless the processing software is well contained (user/process isolation not being nearly good enough, local root exploits abound).

[Simon]

This reminds me of a program called computer clear that was supposed to generate healthy frequencies to prevent fatigue due to using a computer. I asked the seller who forwarded my coments to the developer how the "signal" was being emitted by the program as no hardware was supplied, needless to say no reply ensued. People will make up the most fantasdtic things and other so called intelligent people will beleive them.

[botcrusher]

I think the real problem with this isn't as an attack vector, but as a way for infected machines to potentially communicate. A virus could communicate with others undetected, obviously not very fast, but this could be crippling in an office / lab environment where lots of machines are packed in an area. They could relay instructions in an unmonitored manner, which has plenty of issues that I'm not going to go indepth about right nowm

[Simon]

Yes granted it does allow undetectable communication but gee it's a little far fetched. It's like when they made headlines over hacking a car and bringing to a stop on a 70mph motorway by getting into the car stereo, what they failed to point out was the shear tiny probability it could even be pulled off granted technically feaseable.

[CatalinaWOW]

So all you have to do is come up with scenarios where multiple infected machines have no better way to communicate than through ultrasound.  It seems to me that if you have the ingenuity to get the infections in place you can certainly figure ways to use bluetooth, wifi, infrared, wired ethernet or any number of other paths for communications.  Even if there are firewalls and they are being monitored.

Maybe this story was propagated by someone who hates the use of company resources to play .mp3s or to stream music off the net and was trying to justify disabling all of the sound cards.

[botcrusher]

They can't do that anyways, accessibility lawsuits would ensue.

[R005T3r]

Alright, interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_malware
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/12/scientist-developed-malware-covertly-jumps-air-gaps-using-inaudible-sound/

 I hardly doubt that this will be the next attack method of the following years for hackers, but still interesting. At this point you use a RF jammer: cheap to build and definitely you can isolate your pc.

[botcrusher]

I'd be more curious to see if it could be used decently for half duplex serial connection.

Fire up some python with pyserial, get an audio manipulation library, fire away!

[timb]

With continuously running voice recognition this is actually becoming a realistic threat on some platforms.

PS. surprised no one said this yet : virus over audio, you mean like religion?

Fortunately for us, the Sumerian god Enki used his silver tongue to coded up some verbal anti-virus software to protect Humanity from linguistic viruses. Unfortunately, this "nam-shub" had the side effect of splitting the world up into many distinct languages. So long as nobody figures out how to pull an Asherah with the original, base tongue, we're safe. (Though if that *did* happen, I'm sure a Hiro would come along and save us...)