TickTock: Detecting Microphone Status in Laptops Leveraging Electromagnetic Leakage of Clock Signals

We are witnessing a heightened surge in remote privacy attacks on laptop computers. These attacks often exploit malware to remotely gain access to webcams and microphones in order to spy on the victim users. While webcam attacks are somewhat defended with widely available commercial webcam privacy covers, unfortunately, there are no adequate solutions to thwart the attacks on mics despite recent industry efforts. As a first step towards defending against such attacks on laptop mics, we propose TickTock, a novel mic on/off status detection system. To achieve this, TickTock externally probes the electromagnetic (EM) emanations that stem from the connectors and cables of the laptop circuitry carrying mic clock signals. This is possible because the mic clock signals are only input during the mic recording state, causing resulting emanations. We design and implement a proof-of-concept system to demonstrate TickTock's feasibility. Furthermore, we comprehensively evaluate TickTock on a total of 30 popular laptops executing a variety of applications to successfully detect mic status in 27 laptops. Of these, TickTock consistently identifies mic recording with high true positive and negative rates.Comment: 18 pages, 27 figures, ACM CCS'22 conferenc

Game Action Based Power Management for Multiplayer Online Game

Current mobile devices embrace a wide range of functionalities including high speed network support, hardware accelerated 3D graphics, and multimedia capabilities. These capabilities have boosted the interest for enabling multiplayer online games (MOG) support on such devices. However, the lack of similar growth in battery technology limits the usability of these devices for MOGs. In this paper, we present energy conservation techniques for highly interactive MOGs. These are games, such as firstperson shooters, where crisp user interaction is paramount to the overall game experience. Hence, conserving energy while preserving crisp user interaction becomes a critical consideration in this domain. We first present three obvious power management approaches and highlight their limitations. We then discuss two applicationassisted approaches for power management that manage to save power while preserving the required user experience. Our results demonstrate that these applicationassisted approaches are very promising

PGTP: Power aware game transport protocol for multi-player mobile games

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Dynamic lookahead mechanism for conserving power in multi-player mobile games

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Adaptive display power management for mobile games

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

ARIVU: Power-Aware Middleware for Multiplayer Mobile Games

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier