Recent research reveals revealing data on the risk of monitoring technology used by robot vacuum cleaners on the market.
If you thought that your robot vacuum cleaner that cleans your house was one of your best friends, recent research has apparently concluded that these types of vacuum cleaners can be hacked remotely, to the point of being used as a microphone when you don’t realize it. , even mapping the inside of your house without your consent.
This has been stated by a group of researchers led by Nirupam Roy , who is an assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, together in a study carried out with Professor Jun Han of the University of Singapore. Both have managed to collect information from the navigation system of this type of robot vacuum cleaners that are laser-based applying signal processing and deep learning techniques.
Specifically, the research collected in scitechdaily indicates that any device that uses light and range detection technology ( Lidar ) can potentially be manipulated as a monitoring device by transmitting sound, even when said devices do not have a microphone. This work has been presented at the conference of the Association of Computing Machinery on network integrated sensor system.
So that you understand exactly what the Lidar navigation system is in this type of robot vacuum cleaners, it is the beam in charge of mapping the room, not only to avoid obstacles, but also to learn which is the best route to clean a specific room. Often all these maps of our home are stored in the cloud, something that can be available to certain cybercriminals.
That is why the team points out that Lidar technology can pose a certain security risk by transforming these robot vacuum cleaners into devices not only for sound recording, but also for interior mapping . And it is that all those smart devices that we have at home can be potentially hacked, so you must always be very clear about what type of information they are accessing.
