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Mic-E-Mouse: Eavesdropping via High-Resolution Mice

🔊 A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine shows that very high-resolution optical sensors in some mice can detect minute desk vibrations produced by speech. The theoretical attack, labeled Mic-E-Mouse, requires mice with extremely high DPI (≈10,000+) and very high polling rates (≈4,000 Hz+) and malware to exfiltrate raw sensor frames. The raw signals are extremely noisy, but Wiener filtering and ML-based denoising allowed partial speech recovery under controlled lab conditions. Significant practical limitations — few qualifying models, controlled setups with speakers inches from the sensor, and steep drops in accuracy with common barriers — plus straightforward mitigations make the attack largely a proof of concept for now.