The device works by randomly emitting audio sounds that are not the device’s wake word, such as “Alexa” for Amazon’s Echo devices — sounds that humans might make in their day-to-day lives but that were not intended to wake up the voice assistant. If the smart home device is activated by the sound, it starts streaming audio from the company that runs it, and LeakyPick will notice that activity on the home’s Internet network.
In testing the prototype, the research team discovered 89 non-wake words that would cause an Alexa-enabled device to start sending the audio to Amazon. “For many privacy-conscious consumers, having Internet-connected voice assistants [with] microphones scattered around their homes is a concerning prospect,” Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, one of the researchers, told Wired. “The LeakyPick device identifies smart home devices that unexpectedly record and send audio to the Internet and warns the user about it.”
