YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Eye of Sauron: Long-Range Hidden Spy Camera Detection

57 points ortusdux 2 days ago 12 comments

rsamtravis 1 hour ago | parent

Okay who can build me one of these?

ranger_danger 1 hour ago | parent

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.

Jackobrien 1 hour ago | parent

This feels very impactful for national security and corporate espionage.

bezusfaphoon 1 hour ago | parent

phenomenal

akoboldfrying 59 minutes ago | parent

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?

soltanov 52 minutes ago | parent

Impressive research, but the countermeasure is fifty years old: adequate shielding. The authors did not find a fundamental flaw in cameras; they found cheap plastic enclosures.

SubiculumCode 31 minutes ago | parent

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).

soltanov 18 minutes ago | parent

Thin copper tape adds zero noticeable bulk. The SDR can filter room noise by locking onto clock harmonics, but shielding kills the emission before it leaves the box.

mike_d 15 minutes ago | parent

Exactly. Professional grade equipment already has extensive shielding to mitigate non-linear junction detectors.