Invisible Ears Mouse Sensor Paper

Invisible Ears at Your Fingertips: Acoustic Eavesdropping via Mouse Sensors Mohamad Habib Fakih, Rahul Dharamji, Youssef Mahmoud, Halima Bouzidi, Mohammad Abdullah Al Farouqe Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA {mhfakih, rdharmaj, yhmahmou, hbouzidi, alfarouq}@uci.edu Abstract—Modern optical mouse sensors, with their advanced imaging and high resolution, possess an often overlooked vulnerability: they can be exploited for side-channel attacks. This paper introduces Mic-E-Mouse, the first-ever side-channel attack that targets high-performance optical mouse sensors to covertly eavesdrop on users. We demonstrate that audio signals can induce subpixel surface vibrations detectable by a mouse’s optical sensor. Remarkably, user-space software on typical operating systems can collect and broadcast this sensitive side channel, granting attackers access to raw mouse data without requiring direct system-level permissions. Initially, the vibration signals extracted from mouse data are of poor quality due to non-uniform sampling, a non-linear frequency response, and significant quantization. To overcome these limitations, Mic-E-Mouse employs a sophisticated end-to-end data filtering pipeline that combines Wiener filtering, resampling corrections, and an innovative encoder-only spectrogram neural filtering technique. We evaluate the attack’s efficacy across diverse conditions, including speaking volume, mouse polling rate and DPI, surface materials, speaker location, and environmental noise. In controlled environments, Mic-E-Mouse improves the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by up to +19 dB for speech reconstruction. Furthermore, our results demonstrate a speech recognition accuracy of roughly 42% to 61% on the AudioMNIST and VCTK datasets. All our code and datasets are publicly accessible on Mic-E-Mouse website¹. I. INTRODUCTION Mouse sensitivity over time Vulnerable PRAW3395 1-8KHz ● $35+ PAW3390 1-8KHz ● $40+ It includes OEM-branded variants mouse polling rate Sensei 310 1KHz ● $60 Model O 1KHz ● $80 IntelliMouse 1KHz ● $85 1KHz G400s PixArt Avago Other Year Fig. 1: Computer mice optical sensor fidelity trends over time. The red-shaded region indicates vulnerable sensors featuring high resolution measured in DPI (Dots-per-inch).

A screenshot of a serious-looking academic paper titled “Invisible Ears at Your Fingertips: Acoustic Eavesdropping via Mouse Sensors,” describing how optical mouse sensors can covertly reconstruct nearby speech. The joke is the absurd escalation of an ordinary computer mouse into a surveillance device capable of listening to conversations, presented in an overly technical research-paper format. It is shared as a reaction to bizarre cybersecurity discoveries, excessive technological paranoia, or unexpectedly dangerous everyday gadgets.

• @rzeczyzabawne / 22308 2026-02-16