mmEar: Push the Limit of COTS mmWave Eavesdropping on Headphones

Recent years have witnessed a surge of headphones (including in-ear headphones) usage in works and communications. Because of the privacy-preserve property, people feel comfortable having confidential communication wearing headphones and pay little attention to speech leakage. In this paper, we present an end-to-end eavesdropping system, mmEar, which shows the feasibility of launching an eavesdropping attack on headphones leveraging a commercial mmWave radar. Different from previous works that realize eavesdropping by sensing speech-induced vibrations with reasonable amplitude, mmEar focuses on capturing the extremely faint vibrations with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the surface of headphones. Toward this end, we propose a faint vibration emphasis (FVE) method that models and amplifies the mmWave responses to speech-induced vibrations on the In-phase and Quadrature (IQ) plane, followed by a deep denoising network to further improve the SNR. To achieve practical eavesdropping on various headphones and setups, we propose a cGAN model with a pretrain-finetune scheme, boosting the generalization ability and robustness of the attack by generating high-quality synthesis data. We evaluate mmEar with extensive experiments on different headphones and earphones and find that most of them can be compromised by the proposed attack for speech recovery.