Eye of Sauron: Long-Range Hidden Spy Camera Detection

This made me think of The Thing, a fascinating listening device made by the Soviets that was completely passive until powered remotely. Very difficult to detect when unpowered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

And then I thought, something similar might be possible for video. Turns out, yep.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8719264

The Eye of Sauron paper does acknowledge the limitations that would likely prevent it from working against such a device. Impressive nonetheless. True privacy/security is just very hard!

Interesting - but 800-900MHz (the mentioned harmonic frequencies) are blasted with LTE and 5G in Europe.

But maybe with a sharp filter (there's a gap between up- and downlink) it can be used with a RTLSDR. But the RTLSDR hates close strong signals as its 8-Bit ADC doesn't have much dynamic range.

This is a genius approach. I was wondering how to approach this problem myself the other day, and other things like audio poisoning for ambient listening devices. This gives me hope for being able to actually fight in the cat and mouse game of privacy that's coming up.

So the mitigation is to have larger memory buffers so processing/emissions can be delayed (assuming simple shielding isn't enough).

Eye of Sauron to counter Palantir. Makes sense.

This feels very impactful for national security and corporate espionage.

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.

Tag 2024?

Back to microfilm for the spies

Okay who can build me one of these?

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?

phenomenal

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